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Fast prediction of blast loading for three-dimensional urban building clusters based on Bayesian deep active learning
Explosion and Shock Waves 2026, 46(11)
Published: 05 November 2026
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To address the high cost and low sample efficiency of deep learning-based blast loading prediction in urban environments, a Bayesian deep active learning (BDAL) method is proposed. The objective is to significantly reduce the dependency on large-scale, high-fidelity numerical simulation data while maintaining prediction accuracy and providing reliable uncertainty quantification. A three-dimensional typical urban building cluster consisting of a 3×3 regular array of cuboid buildings was constructed. A seven-dimensional parameter space was defined, including explosive charge equivalence(1000, 2000, 3000 kt), detonation distance (1000, 2 000, 3000 m), building length (10, 20, 30 m), building width (20, 40 m), building height (75, 100 m), street length (50, 75, 100 m), and street width (50, 75 m). A full factorial experimental design was employed, generating 648 parameter combinations. For each combination, the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software blastFoam was used to perform three-dimensional numerical simulations of blast wave propagation. The background mesh size was set to 30 m based on grid sensitivity analysis, and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) with local refinement level 2 and dynamic refinement level 1 was applied to capture shock wave details. Peak overpressure values were recorded at 12 points of interest (POIs) in the building cluster, resulting in a dataset of 7776 samples. A BDAL framework was then developed. Bayesian inference was integrated into a deep neural network to enable probabilistic modeling of parameters. Monte Carlo (MC) dropout was adopted as an approximate variational inference method to estimate predictive uncertainty. An uncertainty-driven active sampling strategy was designed: the predictive variance of each unlabeled sample was computed via 30 stochastic forward passes with dropout enabled. Samples with variance exceeding 85% of the maximum variance were selected as candidates, and the top 28 cases (336 samples) with the highest variance were chosen in each active learning cycle. These selected samples were labeled by the blastFoam simulator and added to the training set. The model was retrained iteratively until the relative improvement in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) fell below 1% or the labeled set reached the full training size. On a test set of 780 unseen samples (65 cases), the proposed BDAL method achieved an MAPE of 13.1% and an R2 of 0.972 for peak overpressure prediction. The 95% prediction interval covered the true values in 85.9% of the cases, with a normalized mean prediction interval width (NMPIW) of 0.026. Single-point prediction response time was below 20 ms, representing a speedup of more than 105 compared to high-fidelity numerical simulations. Compared to passive deep learning models trained on the full dataset, the BDAL method required only about 50% of labeled data to reach comparable prediction accuracy. In a comparative experiment with 50% training data, BDAL achieved a MAPE of 17.2%, while a conventional fully connected neural network (FCNN) and a three-dimensional direction-encoded Bayesian neural network (3D-DeBNN) gave MAPEs of 52.9% and 22.6%, respectively. The proposed Bayesian deep active learning method enables efficient and low-cost blast loading prediction in typical regularized urban environments. It effectively reduces the dependency on large-scale numerical simulation data, maintains high prediction accuracy and reliable uncertainty quantification, and meanwhile achieves millisecond-level inference speed. The method shows strong potential for disaster prevention and mitigation applications, such as pre-disaster anti-blast design and post-disaster emergency response.

Open Access Issue
Fast estimation of blast loading in complex structures based on Bayesian deep learning
Explosion and Shock Waves 2025, 45(8)
Published: 05 August 2025
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For the estimation of blast loading in complex structures, traditional numerical simulation methods were computationally intensive whereas rapid estimation methods based on neural networks can only provide estimates at local points without providing confidence intervals for the predicted results. To achieve fast and reliable estimation of the blast loading in complex structures, Bayesian theory was combined with deep learning to develop a Bayesian deep learning approach for rapid estimation of blast loading in complex structures. The approach initially utilized open-source numerical simulation software to generate a dataset of blast loading in complex structures, encompassing a wide range of parameters such as explosion equivalents, locations, and velocities. During this process, mesh sizes that balanced computational accuracy and speed were determined through mesh sensitivity analysis and the verification of the numerical simulation accuracy. Then, the deep learning model was extended into a Bayesian deep learning model based on Bayesian theory. By introducing probability distributions over the weights of the neural network, the model parameters were treated as random variables. Variational Bayesian inference was then employed to efficiently train the model, ensuring the accuracy of rapid blast loading estimation while also equipping the model with the ability to quantify uncertainty. Finally, metrics such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), normalized mean prediction interval width (NMPIW) and prediction interval coverage probability (PICP) were adopted to quantitatively assess the model's estimated accuracy and the precision of the uncertainty quantification. Additionally, an error decomposition of the estimation results was conducted to analyze model’s performance based on target parameters and scaled distance. The results indicate that the proposed method achieved an estimation error of 12.2% on the test set, with a confidence interval covering over 81.6% of true values, and less than 20 milliseconds of the estimation time for a single sample point. This method provides a novel approach for fast and accurate estimation of blast loading in complex structures with sufficient confidence for the estimation results.

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