Development of a computational efficient tool for robust structural optimization
Abstract
Purpose
Optimization under a deterministic approach generally leads to a final design in which the performance may degrade significantly and/or constraints can be violated because of perturbations arising from uncertainties. The purpose of this paper is to obtain a better strategy that would obtain an optimum design which is less sensitive to changes in uncertain parameters. The process of finding these optima is referred to as robust design optimization (RDO), in which improvement of the performance and reduction of its variability are sought, while maintaining the feasibility of the solution. This overall process is very time consuming, requiring a robust tool to conduct this optimum search efficiently.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors propose an integrated tool to efficiently obtain RDO solutions. The tool encompasses suitable multiobjective optimization (MO) techniques (encompassing: Normal-Boundary Intersection, Normalized Normal-Constraint, weighted sum method and min-max methods), a surrogate model using reduced order method for cheap function evaluations and adequate procedure for uncertainties quantification (Probabilistic Collocation Method).
Findings
To illustrate the application of the proposed tool, 2D structural problems are considered. The integrated tool prove to be very effective reducing the computational time by up to five orders of magnitude, when compared to the solutions obtained via classical standard approaches.
Originality/value
The proposed combination of methodologies described in the paper, leads to a very powerful tool for structural optimum designs, considering uncertainty parameters, that can be extended to deal with other class of applications.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Brazilian research agency CNPq and Pernambuco state research agency FACEPE for the financial support of various research projects developed in this area by the PADMEC Research Group.
Citation
Motta, R.d.S., Afonso, S.M.B., Lyra, P.R. and Willmersdorf, R.B. (2015), "Development of a computational efficient tool for robust structural optimization", Engineering Computations, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 258-288. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-06-2013-0172
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited