Deadline-driven approach for multi-fidelity surrogate-assisted environmental model calibration

This paper describes the approach for calibration of environmental models with the presence of time and quality restrictions. Advantages of the suggested strategy are based on two main concepts. The first advantage was provided by reducing the overall optimisation time due to the surrogate modelling of fitness function with the iterative gradual refinement of the environmental model fidelity (spatial and temporal resolution) for improving the fitness approximation. For the demonstration of the efficiency of surrogate-assisted multi-fidelity approach, it was compared with the baseline evolutionary calibration approach. The second advantage was assured by additional increasing of optimisation quality in the presence of strict deadline due to the building the strategy of multi-fidelity fitness approximation directly during the evolutionary algorithm execution. In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed dynamic strategy, it was compared with the preliminary meta-optimisation approach. As a case study, the wind wave model SWAN is used. The conducted experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed anytime approach and its applicability for the complex environmental models' parameters calibration.