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

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.