The computational models of physical systems comprise parameters, independent and dependent variables. Since the physical processes themselves are seldom known precisely and since most of the model parameters stem from experimental procedures which are also subject to imprecisions, the results predicted by these models are also imprecise, being affected by the uncertainties underlying the respective model. The functional derivatives (also called “sensitivities”) of results (also called “responses”) produced by mathematical/computational models are needed for many purposes,...

This text describes a comprehensive adjoint sensitivity analysis methodology (C-ASAM), developed by the author, enabling the efficient and exact computation of arbitrarily high-order functional derivatives of model responses to model parameters in large-scale systems. The model’s responses can be either scalar-valued functionals of the model’s parameters and state variables (as customarily encountered, e.g., in optimization problems) or general function-valued responses, which are often of interest but are currently not amenable to efficient sensitivity analysis. The C-ASAM framework...