Adding an example

This page explains how to add your own data/simulation code/... to the toolbox to model it.

Project directories

Since version 6.0 every example (and all related files) is self contained in a project directory. See examples/ for a list of examples and associated project directories. You can use one of them as an example for how to add your own.

Simulator file

If you want to create a surrogate model (metamodel) for your own problem you will first have to write a simulator xml file. Again, use one of the exsiting simulator xml files (from on of the examples) as a guide. The simulator xml file should have the same name and capitalization as the project directory (except for the .xml extension). Also see the Simulator configuration page.

You can then edit this file to suit your particular problem. This file should be pretty straightforward to write.

For versions < 6.0: Datasets should be placed in examples/data/txt. In case of doubt about which dataset to use, use 'ScatteredDataFile'. Matlab scripts should be placed in src/matlab/examples.

For version 6.0: You can just copy the Datasets, matlab scripts, extra files in the project directory you created in the steps above.

For an explanation of the data format and how the toolbox interfaces with the simulator, see the Interfacing with the toolbox page.

Having written your simulator XML file and provided the datasets/executables you now just need to change default.xml so it uses your problem (<Simulator> tag). Finally you just run 'go'. In version 5.0 of the toolbox you would just use the name of the simulator configuration file, for version 6.0 you must specify the project directory name (can be an absolute path or a directory name inside the toolbox path).

Note that, depending on whether your simulator is a script, native executable, dataset or Matlab script you will need to set different sample evaluator configuration options. For example, if your data comes from a dataset you will have to set the sample evaluator to scattered or gridded, depending if you data points are scattered or on a regular grid. If on the other hand your data comes from a native executable you would want to use the local sample evaluator with the simulatorType set to "external" (you can also set the type to "java" if your executable is a java class). For Matlab scripts the sample evaluator to use is matlab.