Surrogate models are widely used in simulation-based engineering design and optimization to save the computing cost. The choice of sampling approach has a great impact on the metamodel accuracy. This article presents a robust error-pursuing sequential sampling approach called cross-validation (CV)-Voronoi for global metamodeling. During the sampling process, CV-Voronoi uses Voronoi diagram to partition the design space into a set of Voronoi cells according to existing points. The error behavior of each cell is estimated by leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation approach. Large prediction error indicates that the constructed metamodel in this Voronoi cell has not been fitted well and, thus, new points should be sampled in this cell. In order to rapidly improve the metamodel accuracy, the proposed approach samples a Voronoi cell with the largest error value, which is marked as a sensitive region. The sampling approach exploits locally by the identification of sensitive region and explores globally with the shift of sensitive region. Comparative results with several sequential sampling approaches have demonstrated that the proposed approach is simple, robust, and achieves the desired metamodel accuracy with fewer samples, that is needed in simulation-based engineering design problems.

Computer simulations have been increasingly used to study physical problems in various fields. To relieve computational budgets, the cheap-to-run metamodels, constructed from finite experiment points in the design space using the design of computer experiments (DOE), are employed to replace the costly simulation models. A key issue related to DOE is designing sequential computer experiments to achieve an accurate metamodel with as few points as possible. This article investigates the performance of current Bayesian sampling approaches and proposes an adaptive maximum entropy (AME) approach. In the proposed approach, the leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation error estimates the error information in an easy way, the local space-filling exploration strategy avoids the clustering problem, and the search pattern from global to local improves the sampling efficiency. A comparison study of six examples with different types of initial points demonstrated that the AME approach is very promising for global metamodeling.