Abstract
Modern engineering design problems involve complexity of disciplinary coupling and difficulty of problem formulation. Multidisciplinary design optimization can overcome the complexity and design optimization software or frameworks can lessen the difficulty. Recently, a growing number of new multidisciplinary design optimization techniques have been proposed. However, each technique has its own pros and cons and it is hard to predict a priori which technique is more efficient than others for a specific problem. In this study, a software system has been developed to directly solve MDO problems with minimal input required. Since the system is based on MATLAB, it can exploit the optimization toolbox which is already developed and proven to be effective and robust. The framework is devised to change an MDO technique to another as the optimization goes on and it is called a reconfigurable MDO framework. Several numerical examples are shown to prove the validity of the reconfiguration idea and its effectiveness.
