at these planes are similar to each other, allowing us to search for the optimal inlet among the
parametrized wake distributions. Even if in this case the numerical experiments are conducted in a
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) setting, the methodology is in principle easily transferable
to different contexts.
Typically, such an operation is performed within an optimization procedure, in which the di-
rect problem is iteratively solved by varying the input until the desired output is reached. This,
of course, implies the necessity to numerically parametrize the input in a proper way, possibly
allowing a large variety of admissible inputs and at the same time a limited number of parameters.
Moreover, the necessity to solve the direct problem for many different instances makes the entire
process computationally expensive, especially dealing with the numerical solution of Partial Dif-
ferential Equations (PDEs). A possible solution to overcome such computational burden is offered
by the Reduced Order Modelling (ROM) techniques.
ROM constitutes a constantly growing approach for model simplification, allowing for a real-
time approximation of the numerical solution of the problem at hand. Among the methods al-
ready introduced in the literature, the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) has become
in recent developments an important tool for dealing with PDEs, especially in parametric set-
tings [37, 29, 13, 35]. Such a framework aims to efficiently combine the numerical solutions for
different configurations of the problem, typically pre-computed using consolidated methods — e.g.
finite volume, finite element — such that at any model inference all this information is combined
for providing a fast approximation. Within iterative and many-query processes, like inverse prob-
lems, this methodology allows a huge computational gain. The many repetitions of the direct
problem, needed to find the target input, can be performed at the reduced level, requiring then a
finite and fixed set of numerical solutions only for building the ROM. The coupling between ROM
and the inverse problem has been already investigated in literature for heat flux estimation in a
data assimilation context [25], in aerodynamic application [2], in haemodynamic problems [19].
An alternative way to efficiently deal with this kind of problem has been explored in a Bayesian
framework [22]. Moreover, among all the contributions in literature we cite [40, 16] as an example
of inverse problem with pointwise observations and inverse problem in a boundary element method
context, respectively.
This contribution introduces an entire and novel machine learning pipeline to deal with the
inverse problems in a ROM setting. In specific, we combine three different uses of Artificial Neural
Network (ANN), that are: i) parametrization of the boundary condition given a certain target
distribution or pointwise observations, ii) dimensionality compression of the discrete space of the
original — the so-called full-order — model and iii) approximation of the parametric solution
manifold. It derives a data-driven pipeline (graphically represented in Figure 1) able to provide a
parametrization of the original problem, which is successively exploited for the optimization in the
reduced space. Finally, the optimization is carried out by involving a Genetic Algorithm (GA),
but in principle can be substituted by any other optimization algorithm.
The contribution presents in Section 2 an algorithmic overview of the employed methods,
whereas Section 3 illustrates the results of the numerical investigation pursued to the above-
mentioned test case. In particular, we present details for all the intermediate outcomes, comparing
them to the results obtained by employing state-of-the-art techniques. Finally, Section 4 is ded-
icated to summarizing the entire content of the contribution, drawing future perspectives and
highlighting the criticisms highlighted during the development of this contribution.
2 Methodology
We dedicate this section to providing an algorithmic overview of the numerical tools composing
the computational pipeline.
2.1 Boundary parametrization using ANN
Neural networks are a class of regression techniques and the general category of Feed-forward neu-
ral networks has been the subject of considerable research in several fields in recent years. The
capability of ANN to approximate any function [15] and the even greater computational availability
allowed indeed the massive employment of such an approach to overcome many limitations. In the
2