Multi-Fidelity Modeling For The Design Of A Maritime Environmental Survey Network Utilizing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

New maritime operational concepts are being considered for future network topologies that are efficient and reliable in underwater domains where the design of networking is challenging due to the harshness of the environment. Various communication and network simulation tools exist to model scenarios of interest and evaluate metrics of interest, e.g., latency, throughput and reliability, for high-fidelity evaluations. However, the computation time required for high-fidelity simulation is extensive for evaluating many network topologies associated with topology optimization. Thus we develop low-fidelity models to explore many network topologies and identify a few Pareto optimal configurations to evaluate with the high-fidelity simulation. In this paper, we demonstrate a multi-fidelity topology optimization methodology for maritime environmental survey operations involving multiple unmanned underwater vehicles. The low-fidelity models developed for this maritime operation scenario are able to accurately identify the intuitive optimal solution based on multiple objectives, which are then validated by high-fidelity simulations.