ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Aerosp. Eng.

Sec. Intelligent Aerospace Systems

Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpace.2025.1522006

This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Twins in Aerospace EngineeringView all articles

Pruning Bayesian Networks for Computationally Tractable Multi-Model Calibration

Provisionally accepted
Nicolas  GratiusNicolas Gratius*Mario  BergésMario BergésBurcu  AkinciBurcu Akinci
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Anomaly response in aerospace systems increasingly relies on multi-model analysis in digital twins to replicate the system's behaviors and inform decisions. However, computer model calibration methods are typically deployed on individual models and are limited in their ability to capture dependencies across models. In addition, model heterogeneity has been a significant issue in integration efforts. Bayesian Networks are well suited for multi-model calibration tasks as they can be used to formulate a mathematical abstraction of model components and encode their relationship in a probabilistic and interpretable manner. The computational cost of this method however increases exponentially with the graph complexity. In this work, we propose a graph pruning algorithm to reduce computational cost while minimizing the loss in calibration ability by incorporating domain-driven metrics for selection purposes. We implement this method using a Python wrapper for BayesFusion software and show that the resulting prediction accuracy outperforms existing pruning approaches which rely primarily on statistics.

Keywords: Bayesian network, reduced order model, Computational cost, Probability, Aerospace Operations, pruning, Probabilistic graphical model, Calibration

Received: 03 Nov 2024; Accepted: 30 Apr 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Gratius, Bergés and Akinci. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Nicolas Gratius, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States

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