A novel machine-learning based framework to evaluate the effect of design parameters affected by epistemic uncertainty on the performance of textile antennas is presented. In particular, epistemic variations are characterized in the framework of possibility theory, which is combined with Bayesian optimization to accurately and efficiently perform uncertainty quantification. A suitable application example validates the proposed method.

In modern electronics, there are many inevitable uncertainties and variations of design parameters that have a profound effect on the performance of a device. These are, among others, induced by manufacturing tolerances, assembling inaccuracies, material diversities, machining errors, etc. This prompts wide interests in enhanced optimization algorithms that take the effect of these uncertainty sources into account and that are able to find robust designs, i.e., designs that are insensitive to the uncertainties early in the design cycle. In this work, a novel machine learning-based optimization framework that accounts for uncertainty of the design parameters is presented. This is achieved by using a modified version of the expected improvement criterion. Moreover, a data-efficient Bayesian Optimization framework is leveraged to limit the number of simulations required to find a robust design solution. Two suitable application examples validate that the robustness is significantly improved compared to standard design methods.