Dynamic Relaxation Coordination Based Collaborative Optimization for Optimal Design of Multi-physics Systems

To solve problems of higher computational burden in standard collaborative optimization (CO) approach during the processing of design problem of the multi-physics systems with multiples disciplines, a Dynamic Relaxation Coordination based Collaborative Optimization (DRC-CO) method is presented. The main concept of DRC-CO method is to decompose the global design problem into one optimization problem at the system level and several autonomous sub-problems at disciplinary level. At the system level, the dynamic relaxation coordination aims to solve the inconsistency between all disciplines, which leads the optimization process converging to the feasible optimum efficiently. To demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed DRC-CO method, a safety isolation transformer is considered. The obtained results of the engineering multi-physics system show the effectiveness of the proposed DRC-CO process compared to Single Level Optimization (SLO) and standard CO methods. The obtained optimal configuration of the safety isolation transformer in terms of total mass using DRC-CO method (2.30 kg) is close to the result obtained from SLO method (2.31 kg) with an absolute percentage error is less than 0.5%. Moreover, our approach requires 3 system iterations to find realizable designs. However, an important number of disciplinary design problems were evaluated at the disciplinary level optimizer.