School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology(HIT), China

Biography: Ke Fang was born in 1977. He received Ph.D. at the School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology(HIT), China, majored in Control Theory and Engineering. He is an associate professor in Control and Simulation Center of HIT now. He was at the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, USA as a visiting scholar from 2014 to 2015, where he worked with Prof. Wei-Tek Tsai who is one of the leading scholars in the field of Saas(Software as a Service). He is a member of China Simulation Federation, an expert reviewer of National Natural Science Foundation of China, a director of Heilongjiang Provincial Model Sports Association, and the expert reviewer of some journals such as “Systems Engineering and Electronics”. His research interests are simulation systems, model validation and UAV flight control systems. He is conducting several research projects sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China, advanced research foundations, and other cooperated departments and corporations. He attends international conference with the topic related to computer science, control theory and application, simulation systems etc. regularly.

Speech Title: The Validation Method for Simulation Models with Iteration Operation

Abstract: Model is the core of a simulation, whose credibility is the key to the success of the simulation application. Iteration operation is common among simulation models, such as most of the control models etc. Because the iteration operation will cause “circular validation” problem in traditional credibility evaluation process, it is difficult to validate models with iteration operation. In order to solve the problem and obtain the credibility of the model, this paper gives a thorough explanation of the “circular validation” problem together with the credibility aggregation problem, and in order to implement traceable credibility evaluation, the paper proposes a building method of the factor space for model validation. The difference between traditional method and the new method is that, the new method for building the factor space is based on a network but not a tree view, which brings the benefit of various types of connections and allowing cross layer relationships between nodes. Furthermore, the paper brings forward a theorem of validation for simulation models with iteration operation, and gives the proof of it. The theorem proves that we only need to validate the constants, the related variants and the initial value of the iteration variant itself to finish the validation, which avoids the “circular validation” problem. Finally, the paper presents a complete validation method and a process for the validation of iteration operation contained models, and gives a case study of a flying vehicle model validation, which contains the quantitative calculation of the credibility and the model defect location.

Keywords: Iteration operation; Simulation model; Model validation; Credibility evaluation; Validation method