What is the history of UQLab?

The UQLab project started in 2013 shortly after Prof. Bruno Sudret founded Chair of Risk, Safety & Uncertainty Quantification at ETH Zurich and decided to gather the results of a decade of his research into a single software package. Since its inception, UQLab has been providing the software backbone of the Chair’s research, allowing for seamless integration between the many research fields engaged by its members, such as metamodeling (e.g., polynomial chaos expansions, Gaussian process modeling, low-rank tensor approximations), reliability analysis (i.e., rare event estimation), global sensitivity analysis, and Bayesian techniques for inverse problems.

After more than two years of development and in an effort to increase the awareness of the scientific community regarding the fundamental aspects of uncertainty quantification, it was decided to open the software to other research institutions. The first closed beta version was published on July 1st, 2015, which allowed the Development Team to collect valuable feedback from users.

UQLab V1.0 was released on April 28th, 2017. With this release, the code was separated between UQLabCore, a domain-specific-language (DSL) and content management system that connects the UQLabModules, which are open-source scientific modules that allow one to carry out various uncertainty quantification analyses such as uncertainty propagation, sensitivity analysis, reliability analysis, and surrogate modeling.

As of today, the UQLab project has accumulated thousands of man-hours of development. The software is being actively extended and new features are introduced with each major release. In its most recent release (V1.2), UQLab features a total of 13 scientific modules capable of carrying out a wide range of uncertainty quantification (UQ) analysis tasks, from uncertainty propagation to Bayesian inversion.

The Development Milestones page of the UQLab website provides a summary of the major milestones of the project.


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