3/26/2018 Tianchen Liu, Shapour Azarm and Nikhil Chopra
J. Mech. Des 139(12); doi: 10.1115/1.4037893
Co-design is the integrated optimization of the physical plant and controller for an engineering system. The challenge in co-design is determining both time-invariant (physical design) variables and time-variant (control) variables. In co-design, as the size of the problem (number of variables) becomes large, the problem can become too difficult for an all-at-once solution. Our approach extends earlier research by creating a class of multi-subsystem co-design problems where both design and control are formulated and solved. A scalable test problem is used for comparing the proposed decentralized co-design optimization approach against a centralized approach. Results of this study show that the computational time of the proposed decentralized approach increases approximately linearly with respect to an increase in the number of subsystems (variables), while the computational cost of the centralized approach increases nonlinearly.

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