Standard Platform for Benchmarking Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization Architectures

Abstract

The multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization community has developed a multitude of algorithms and techniques, called architectures, for performing optimizations on complex engineering systems that involve coupling between multiple discipline analyses. These architectures seek to efficiently handle optimizations with computationally expensive analyses including multiple disciplines. A new testing procedure is proposed that can provide a quantitative and qualitative means of comparison among architectures. The proposed test procedure is implemented within the open-source framework, OpenMDAO, and comparative results are presented for five well-known architectures: multiple design feasible, individual design feasible, collaborative optimization, bilevel integrated systems synthesis, and bilevel integrated systems synthesis 2000. How using open-source software development methods can allow the multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization community to submit new problems and architectures to keep the test suite relevant is also demonstrated.