  Interatomic potentials provide a means to simulate extended length and time
scales that are outside the reach of ab initio calculations. The development of
an interatomic potential for a particular material requires the optimization of
the parameters of the functional form of the potential. We present a
parameterization protocol for analytic bond-order potentials (BOP) that provide
a physically transparent and computationally efficient description of the
interatomic interaction. The parameterization protocol of the BOP follows the
derivation of the BOP along the coarse-graining of the electronic structure
from density-functional theory (DFT) to the tight-binding (TB) bond model to
analytic BOPs. In particular, it starts from TB parameters that are obtained by
downfolding DFT eigenstates of two-atomic molecules to an $sd$-valent minimal
basis. This $sd$-valent Hamiltonian is combined with a pairwise repulsion to
obtain an initial binding energy relation. The $s$ electrons are then removed
from the Hamiltonian and instead represented by an isotropic embedding term. In
the final step, the parameters of the remaining $d$-$d$ interaction, the pair
repulsion and the embedding term are optimized simultaneously. We demonstrate
that the application of this parameterization protocol leads to a basic BOP for
Re with good transferability. We discuss different strategies to refine the
basic BOP towards global transferability or towards local accuracy. We
demonstrate that homogeneous samplings of the structural phase-space in a map
of local atomic environments can be used to systematically increase the global
transferability. We also demonstrate the influence of training data-weighting
on local accuracy refinements with a Pareto-front analysis and suggest further
requirements to select a final BOP. The local accuracy and global
transferability of the final BOP is also shown and compared to DFT.
