MDO for Aerospace Applications

The course will introduce students to multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), as a modern methodology to support complex product development.

Main topics:

- What and why MDO

- Parameterization techniques

- Numerical optimisation methods (focus on gradient based methods)

- Decomposition and coordination of complex computational systems

- the eXtended Design Structure Matrix (XDSM)

- MDO architectures

- Intro to surrogate modeling, discreteenmixed integer problems, genetic

algorithms and Multi Objective Optimisation

There is no conventional exam for this course.

The assessment is based on the quality of one take-home assignment, which will be executed in teams of two students.

The assignment is about setting up and solving an MDO problem using Matlab. The deliverables are the Matlab code and a report.

Two different take-home assignments are defined for the two yearly examination sessions.