In order to optimize the performance of a diesel engine subject to legislative constraints on pollutant emissions, it is necessary to improve their design, and to identify how design parameters a ect engine behaviours. One speci city of this work is that it does not exist a physical model of engine behaviour under all possible operational conditions. A powerful strategy for engine modeling is to build a fast emulator based on carefully chosen observations, made according to an experimental design. In this paper, two Kriging models are considered. One is based on a geostatistical approach and the other corresponds to a Gaussian process metamodel approach. Our aim is to show that the use of each of these methods does not lead to the same results, particularly when "atypical" points are present in our database. In a more precise way, the statistical approach allows us to obtain a good quality modeling even if atypical data are present, while this situation leads to a bad quality of the modeling by the geostatistical approach. This behaviour takes a fundamental importance for the problem of the pollutant emissions, because the analysis of these atypical data, which are rarely erroneous data, can supply precious information for the engine tuning in the design stage.
