Global Meta-Model for System Level Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

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Abstract

This paper presents an efficient global meta-model building technique for solving high fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problems. The main difficulties associated with MDO are often characterized by interdisciplinary couplings, high computational cost of an analysis in individual disciplines and a large number of design variables and constraints. These issues result in very high overall computational cost limiting applications of MDO to complex industrial design problems. To address these issues a combination of global meta-model using moving least squares (MLSM) and the trust region strategy is introduced. A global meta-model is used to identify the feasible and infeasible regions and the trust region strategy is used for a detailed search of the feasible region. The technique is demonstrated on a test problem and the effectiveness of the method for modeling and system level collaborative optimization using high fidelity models is studied. The results show that meta-model based on MLSM provide a high degree of accuracy whilst achieving a considerable reduction in computational cost.

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