Title: Worst case deterministic feasibility and multiobjective robustness measures for engineering design optimisation

Authors: Babak Besharati, Shapour Azarm

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

Abstract: Nearly all real-world engineering design optimisation problems have parameters with uncontrollable variations. Such variations can significantly degrade the performance of optimum design solutions in terms of their feasibility and/or objective functions values, as obtained by multiobjective design optimisation methods. We present a deterministic feasibility and multiobjective optimisation approach, based on some worst case measures, for generating robustly non-dominated optimal solutions. Following this approach, for uncontrollable parameter variations, we can obtain a (1) feasibly robust design: for which no constraint is violated and (2) multiobjectively robust design: for which, with respect to a target and in a multiobjective sense, minimal distance between worst and best case points (or variability) and minimal distance of a worst case point from a target are obtained. We illustrate and verify the approach with a numerical and an engineering example.

Keywords: multiobjective optimisation; robust design; feasibility robustness; multiobjective robustness; engineering design optimisation; reliability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2006.010689

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2006 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.40 - 58

Published online: 19 Aug 2006 *

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