SIM_EXPLORE: Software for Directed Exploration of Complex Systems

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California

Physics-based numerical simulation codes are widely used in science and engineering to model complex systems that would be infeasible to study otherwise. While such codes may provide the highest-fidelity representation of system behavior, they are often so slow to run that insight into the system is limited. Trying to understand the effects of inputs on outputs by conducting an exhaustive grid-based sweep over the input parameter space is simply too time-consuming. An alternative approach called “directed exploration” (see figure) has been developed to harvest information from numerical simulators more efficiently. The basic idea is to employ active learning and supervised machine learning to choose cleverly at each step which simulation trials to run next based on the results of previous trials.

Illustration of the Directed Exploration approach in an asteroid collision application. The central image shows the Ida-Dactyl asteroid pair observed serendipitously by the Galileo spacecraft. Planetary scientists are interested in understanding how such systems form and more generally in how asteroid families form. Physics-based numerical simulations offer a means to gain insight into such systems; however, the simulations are so slow to run that a directed exploration strategy is required.

SIM_EXPLORE is a new computer program that uses directed exploration to explore efficiently complex systems represented by numerical simulations. The software sequentially identifies and runs simulation trials that it believes will be most informative given the results of previous trials. The results of new trials are incorporated into the software’s model of the system behavior. The updated model is then used to pick the next round of new trials. This process, implemented as a closed-loop system wrapped around existing simulation code, provides a means to improve the speed and efficiency with which a set of simulations can yield scientifically useful results.

The software focuses on the case in which the feedback from the simulation trials is binary-valued, i.e., the learner is only informed of the success or failure of the simulation trial to produce a desired output. The software offers a number of choices for the supervised learning algorithm (the method used to model the system behavior given the results so far) and a number of choices for the active learning strategy (the method used to choose which new simulation trials to run given the current behavior model). The software also makes use of the LEGION distributed computing framework to leverage the power of a set of compute nodes. The approach has been demonstrated on a planetary science application in which numerical simulations are used to study the formation of asteroid families.

This work was done by Michael Burl and Esther Wang of Caltech, and Brian Enke and William J. Merline of SWRI for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Dan Broderick at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. NPO-47919