Uranie: An Open-Source Black-Box Platform for Uncertainty Quantification Analyses in Computational Mechanics
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Modern computational mechanics relies on highly complex models, creating an urgent need for robust and flexible uncertainty quantification tools compatible with existing simulation environments. To address these challenges, URANIE is an open-source platform developed by the Division of Software Engineering for Simulation (SGLS) at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to support uncertainty quantification analyses. The platform provides a broad range of advanced methods relevant to computational mechanics, covering uncertainty propagation, sensitivity analysis, model calibration, reliability assessment, surrogate modeling, and optimization. The platform follows a black-box approach, allowing any mechanical or multi-physics model to be used without access to its internal equations or source code. This design promotes interoperability with existing simulation environments and makes URANIE particularly well suited for coupling with established tools in computational mechanics, such as finite element solvers (e.g. CAST3M¹), as well as proprietary or in-house codes. Coupling is achieved through lightweight interfaces based on scripts or file exchanges, enabling seamless integration into existing workflows. From a software perspective, URANIE is implemented in C++ and built on the ROOT framework, providing high computational performance, efficient data management, and both C++ and Python interfaces that combine performance with user-friendly scripting. To tackle the computational cost of large-scale simulations, it supports parallel execution and deployment on clusters. It is actively maintained, with frequent releases and automated testing, contributing to software robustness, reliability and reproducibility. This contribution presents the main features of URANIE and its advantages for reproducible, uncertainty-aware computational mechanics applications. Further details are available in the official documentation [1] and in the reference publication by J.-B. Blanchard et al. [2]. [1] URANIE Development Team, https://uranie.cea.fr. URANIE Open-Source Software, CEA, Available at: https://uranie.cea.fr [2] J.-B. Blanchard, G. Damblin, J-M. Martinez, G. Arnaud, F. Gaudier, The Uranie platform: an open-source software for optimisation, meta-modelling and uncertainty analysis, EPJ Nuclear Sci. Technol., 5, 4, 2019. ¹CAST3M is a finite element software developed by CEA for numerical simulation in solid and structural mechanics.
