World Congress on Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization

1. Abstract It has become apparent that as modern day large-scale systems become increasingly complex the traditional Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) Systems Engineering design philosophy is becoming problematic. The communication of preferences through requirements has resulted in arbitrarily chosen constraints and objective functions attempting to reflect the stakeholder’s desires within the limited design space. Design alternatives are deemed infeasible due to constraint violations even though they maybe preferred by the stakeholder. Value-Driven Design (VDD) offers a new perspective on complex system design, communicating stakeholder preferences through a value function and minimal number of requirements. This paper explores a hybrid VDD/MDO formulation that utilizes the strengths of each discipline. An example of a large-scale complex engineered system is introduced and optimal designs are compared using traditional MDO Systems Engineering formulations and the hybrid VDD/MDO formulations. MDO frameworks of Multidisciplinary Feasible, Individual Discipline Feasible and Collaborative Optimization are used to determine the optimal designs. The example demonstrates the need for proper preference communication through a value function that reflects the stakeholder’s desire through a VDD/MDO formulation. 2.