DEVELOPMENT OF OPTIMAL DESIGN SYSTEMUSING COMMERCIAL PACKAGES AS THE ANALYSIS ENGINE

摘要

This paper is concerned with the development of a structural optimization system using commercial FErn(Finite Element) packages as the analysis engine. There are five main challenges faced when designingrnand developing the system including execution of FE packages, extraction of the FE analysis results,rnmodification of the FE model information, linking of function evaluation with the FE analysis results,rnand integration of different optimization tools. In order to develop a general-purpose and highlyrnflexible optimal design system, modern software technologies including OO (Object-oriented)rntechnology, design patterns and UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams are adopted. Variousrnnumerical examples demonstrate the developed system is indeed very powerful and can be used tornsolve problems of real application.