Title: Multidisciplinary design optimisation - some formal methods, framework requirements, and application to vehicle design

Authors: Srinivas Kodiyalam, Jaroslaw Sobieszczanski-Sobieski

Addresses: SGI, HPC Applications & Market Development, Server & Supercomputing Business, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, MS 405, Mountain View, California 94043-1351, USA. Computational AeroSciences, NASA Langley Research Center, Mail Stop 139, Hampton, Virginia 23681, USA

Abstract: A vehicle is an engineering system whose successful design requires harmonisation of a number of objectives and constraints that, in principle, can be modelled as a constrained optimisation in the space of design variables. However, dimensionality of such optimisation and the complexity and expense of the underlying analysis suggest a decomposition approach to enable concurrent execution of smaller and more manageable tasks. In order to preserve the couplings that naturally occur among the elements of the whole problem, such optimisation by various types of decomposition must include a degree of coordination at the system level. Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) is a body of methods and techniques for performing the above optimisation so as to balance the design considerations at the system and detail levels. The paper is an overview of a few MDO methods selected for their applicability to vehicle systems.

Keywords: high performance computing (HPC); MDO methods/requirements; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2001.001904

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2001 Vol.25 No.1/2, pp.3-22

Published online: 18 Aug 2003 *

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