Testing Design Optimization for Uncertainty Reduction in Generating Off-Road Mobility Map Using a Bayesian Approach

The Next Generation NATO Reference Mobility Model (NG-NRMM) plays a vital role in vehicle mobility prediction and mission planning. The complicated vehicle–terrain interactions and the presence of heterogeneous uncertainty sources in the modeling and simulation (M&S) result in epistemic uncertainty/errors in the vehicle mobility prediction for given terrain and soil conditions. In this paper, the uncertainty sources that cause the uncertainty in mobility prediction are first partitioned into two levels, namely uncertainty in the M&S and uncertainty in terrain and soil maps. With a focus on the epistemic uncertainty in the M&S, this paper presents a testing design optimization framework to effectively reduce the uncertainty in the M&S and thus increase the confidence in generating off-road mobility maps. A Bayesian updating approach is developed to reduce the epistemic uncertainty/errors in the M&S using mobility testing data collected under controllable terrain and soil conditions. The updated models are then employed to generate the off-road mobility maps for any given terrain and soil maps. Two types of design strategies, namely testing design for model selection and testing design for uncertainty reduction, are investigated in the testing design framework to maximize the information gain subject to limited resources. Results of a numerical example demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mobility testing design optimization framework.