Collaborative Reliability Analysis under the Environment of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

Abstract

Uncertainties in multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) have a significant influence on the whole design process of engineering systems. The most probable point (MPP) based reliability analysis is an approach that utilizes the safety index β to measure the effect of uncertainties. Collaborative optimization (CO) is a two-level optimization method specially created for large-scale distributed-analysis applications. Simulated annealing-based collaborative optimization (SA—CO) is one of the improved forms of CO that overcomes the difficulty of convergence given the existing of highly nonlinear consistency constraints. By combining the MPP-based reliability analysis method with SA—CO, we present a new collaborative reliability analysis method under the environment of MDO to deal with uncertainties existing in MDO, that is, MPP—SA—CO. Demonstrated by two typical examples, the proposed method inherits the advantages of CO. Also, accurate and efficient results are obtained by employing simulated annealing algorithmic as the system level optimizer and it features response surface instead of disciplinary optimization.