Development of multiple cycle coupling suspension in complex system optimization

摘要

The design of complex engineering systems requires an initial decomposition of the system into subsystems. ^Couplings link these systems together by transferring output data from one subsystem to the input of another. ^Because complex engineering systems can have hundreds or thousands of such couplings, the optimization of these systems is often quite lengthy. ^To reduce the optimization time, it becomes important that a system designer have the ability to select couplings that have little effect on the solution accuracy, to temporarily remove them. ^Previous coupling strength analysis methods have not analytically related the effect of a coupling's removal for multiple cycles to solution accuracy. ^The method presented in this paper locates weak couplings based on their analytical relationship to the objective function and constraints in the overall optimization problem. ^Discussion of the application of this new method follows, as well as implementation on a decomposed analytical problem. ^The method significantly reduces the number of subsystem analyses required to optimize the decomposed problem by suspending couplings for multiple design cycles. ^(Author)