Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Supported by Knowledge Based Engineering

Preface

When Fillippo Brunelleschi designed the cupola of the Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, in the fifteenth century, he worked alone. The great nineteenth-century engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel worked with small teams of assistants. In designing the Boeing 747, Joe Sutter started with a few hundred engineers in his team but finished with 4,500. In reality, the design team was much larger as there were design teams working on the engines that would power this aircraft. The number of individuals involved in the design process has grown with time reflecting the increase in complexity of the products and the design process itself. Designing a modern product is a process involving an intricate web of cross-connections between the parts of the product systems and their abstractions in the underlying mathematical modeling, reflected in the adage that “everything influences everything else.” An added complexity, today, is that any major design such as the Airbus 380 and a building like the London Shard are created by teams that are globally distributed.

Recognizing the need to develop tools to assist in this design task, the engineering community has invested an enormous effort in creating tools to support the design process. This had led to the development of a range of computational methods for analyzing the disciplines associated with a design, such as structures, aerodynamics, and thermal analysis. The requirement that a new design should represent an improvement on its ...