  This work is in the context of blackbox optimization where the functions
defining the problem are expensive to evaluate and where no derivatives are
available. A tried and tested technique is to build surrogates of the objective
and the constraints in order to conduct the optimization at a cheaper
computational cost. This work proposes different uncertainty measures when
using ensembles of surrogates. The resulting combination of an ensemble of
surrogates with our measures behaves as a stochastic model and allows the use
of efficient Bayesian optimization tools. The method is incorporated in the
search step of the mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithm to improve the
exploration of the search space. Computational experiments are conducted on
seven analytical problems, two multi-disciplinary optimization problems and two
simulation problems. The results show that the proposed approach solves
expensive simulation-based problems at a greater precision and with a lower
computational effort than stochastic models.
