Title: A study on multidisciplinary collaborative optimisation based on an improved PSO

Authors: Xiang-wei Zheng, Hong Liu

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, No. 88, Wenhua Road (East), Jinan, 250014 P.R. China. ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, No. 88, Wenhua Road (East), Jinan, 250014 P.R. China

Abstract: The design of large scale engineering systems becomes more and more complex, therefore collaborative optimisation (CO), one of the multidisciplinary design optimisation (MDO) methods, is often employed to produce optimal solutions. However, CO has disadvantages as increased computational time, slow convergence and unexpected non-linearity of compatibility constraints. In this paper, a CO method based on MLPSO, which is an improved particle swarm optimiser, is proposed to handle above difficulties and is formulated in detail. In the CO framework, MLPSO is served as optimiser both system level and discipline (or subspace) level, which can deal with various objective functions and constraints, some of which cannot be solved by traditional gradient-based optimisation algorithm. An example demonstrates the proposed method and the results show its feasibility and effectiveness.

Keywords: multidisciplinary design optimisation; MDO; collaborative optimisation; gradient-based optimisation; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; collaboration; collaborative design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2009.028040

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2009 Vol.36 No.3/4, pp.162 - 171

Published online: 02 Sep 2009 *

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