Multidisciplinary

Optimization
Multidisciplinary Optimization
• Multidisciplinary Optimization (MDO) focuses on solving
optimization problems spanning across multiple
interacting disciplines

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Disciplinary Analyses
• As with all previous optimization problems, we optimize
a design point, but for each discipline, a disciplinary
analysis is performed on that design point to generate a
set of outputs called response variables for each
disciplinary analysis

where x is the design point, y is a vector of response

variables, m is the number of disciplines, and F is some
function used to compute the ith response variable
vector

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Disciplinary Analyses
• An assignment is an association of a set of variable
names with corresponding values related to the problem
• A disciplinary analysis can be thought of as a way of
updating the response variables for the discipline using
an assignment

• An assignment can be represented in code as a

dictionary or associative array data structure
• Using these structures, variables are not restricted to
numbers, but can be any object such as a vector 4
Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• Interdisciplinary compatibility means response variables
are compatible with all disciplinary analysis
• Interdisciplinary compatibility holds for a particular
assignment if the assignment is unchanged under all
disciplinary analyses

• Finding an assignment that satisfies interdisciplinary

compatibility is called a multidisciplinary analysis

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Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• System optimization for a single discipline requires an
optimizer to select design variables and query the
disciplinary analysis in order to evaluate the constraints
and objective function
• Only one discipline, so no coupling between disciplines

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Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• If there are multiple disciplines, then dependencies
have to be considered

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Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• Dependencies can be mapped to form a dependency
graph
• If disciplines are mutually dependent on each other,
then they have a dependency cycle

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Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• If a dependency graph has no cycles, then there always
exists an evaluation ordering such that dependencies
are satisfied called a topological ordering
• Kahn’s algorithm can find such orderings

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Interdisciplinary Compatibility
• If there are dependency cycles, then no topological
ordering exists
• A general approach is iterative techniques such as the
Gauss-Seidel method
• Depending on the nature of the problem,
iterative methods can converge slowly

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Architectures
• General MDO problem formulation

where f and depend on both the design and response

variables

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Multidisciplinary Design Feasible
• The multidisciplinary design feasible architecture
structures the MDO problem such that standard
optimization algorithms can be directly applied to
optimize the design variables

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Multidisciplinary Design Feasible
• Primary advantage of the multidisciplinary design
feasible architecture is that the procedure is simple
• The primary disadvantage is that it can be expensive,
requiring multiple discipline analyses
• Problems with complex dependencies may not converge

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Sequential Optimization
• The sequential optimization architecture attempts to
optimize the overall MDO problem by optimizing over
multiple subproblems
• A subproblem is an optimization procedure performed
over a subset of the design variables while focusing on
a particular discipline
• The system-level optimizer takes the results from each
subproblem and optimizes over the remaining variables
• This architecture often leads to suboptimal solutions
and is often used as a baseline against which other
optimization architectures are measured
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Sequential Optimization

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Individual Discipline Feasible
• The Individual Discipline Feasible architecture allows
disciplinary analyses to be conducted in parallel
• A set of coupling variables c are introduced which serve
as proxies for the response variables
• The optimizer modifies the design point at each
iteration until c has converged to a feasible equivalent
to y

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Individual Discipline Feasible

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Collaborative Optimization
• The Collaborative Optimization architecture breaks
down a problem into disciplinary subproblems that have
full control over local design variables and discipline-
specific constraints and can be analyzed in parallel
• Coupling variables are defined to enable iterative
convergence to a feasible optimal solution
• Collaborative Optimization is an example of a
distributed architecture

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Collaborative Optimization

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Simultaneous Analysis and Design
• The simultaneous analysis and design (SAND)
architecture avoids coordinating between multiple
design analyses and combines the entire optimization
process into a single optimizer
• Any disciplinary analysis can be transformed into
residual form

• The MDO problem can then be stated simply as

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Simultaneous Analysis and Design
• An advantage of SAND is that the solution process is
simpler, provided the problem supports transformation
into residual form
• SAND can also traverse infeasible regions of the search
space to find an optimal, feasible solution
• A disadvantage is that not
all problems support transformation to
residual form

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Summary
• Multidisciplinary design optimization requires reasoning
about multiple disciplines and achieving agreement
between coupled variables
• Disciplinary analyses can often be ordered to minimize
dependency cycles
• Multidisciplinary design problems can be structured in
different architectures that take advantage of problem
features to improve the optimization process
• The multidisciplinary design feasible architecture
maintains feasibility and compatibility through the use
of slow and potentially nonconvergent multidisciplinary
design analyses 22
Summary
• Sequential optimization allows each discipline to
optimize its discipline-specific variables but does not
always yield optimal designs
• The individual discipline feasible architecture allows
parallel execution of analyses at the expense of adding
coupling variables to the global optimizer
• Collaborative optimization incorporates suboptimizers
that can leverage domain specialization to optimize
some variables locally

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Summary
• The simultaneous analysis and design architecture
replaces design analyses with residuals, allowing the
optimizer to find compatible solutions but cannot
directly use disciplinary solution techniques

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