potential for the system H + H₂ as a function of the three H-H distances.

For more complicated systems, calculation of the energy of a particular arrangement of atoms is often too computationally expensive for large scale representations of the surface to be feasible. For these systems a possible approach is to calculate only a reduced set of points on the PES and then use a computationally cheaper interpolation method, for example Shepard interpolation, to fill in the gaps.