A new multidisciplinary design optimization method

Having a bilevel problem formulations, collaborative optimization (CO) has received considerable attention as an approach to multidisciplinary optimization in engineering. But the system-level problems of CO might suffer from inherent computational difficulties due to the bilevel nature of the method. This paper presents a new method named advanced collaborative optimization (ACO) based on CO. ACO is a single-level method which doesn't have the system level but has a target subsystem and other coordination subsystems. ACO avoid the computational difficulties in CO by changing former system-level constraints into another objective in target subsystem, and the new objective is going to be minimized by the collaborative optimization between target subsystem and coordination subsystems in the process of the system optimization. Two examples are given to illustrate the performance of ACO. The results show that the new approach is capable for such multidisciplinary optimization problems.