Recently, buildings and structures erected in Russia and abroad have to comply with stringent economic requirements. Buildings should not only be reliable and safe, have a beautiful architectural design, but also meet the criteria of rationality and energy efficiency. In practice, this usually means the need for additional comparative analysis in order to determine the optimal solution to the engineering task. Usually such an analysis is time-consuming and requires huge computational efforts. In this regard, surrogate modeling can be an effective tool for solving such problems. This article provides a brief description of surrogate models and the basic techniques of their construction, describes the construction process of a surrogate model to calculate initial rotational stiffness of welded RHS joints made of high strength steel (HSS).