An MDO advisory system supported by knowledge-based technologies

Abstract

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) can aid designers to improve already mature design solutions, as well as to explore innovative, complex engineering products. It is a methodology, complete with mathematical formulations, that assists in the optimization of a complex product, whilst considering and exploiting discipline interactions. Although the first MDO applications have been developed decades ago, this discipline is not yet fully exploited within industry. One of the main reasons is the lack of understanding due to the inherent complexity of the discipline itself and the lack of awareness of existing MDO technologies, software and implementation strategies. This paper introduces a potential measure to lower the accessibility level of MDO: an MDO advisory system supported by knowledge-based technologies. This MDO advisory system will enable the user to first specify an MDO problem and it will return a ranked list of suitable MDO architectures, based on the characteristics of the specified problem, to the user. Additionally, the advisory system will support the user during the implementation of the suggested optimization approach by providing (links to) specific documentation and, most of all, take care of some of the software intensive operations required to integrate the selected architecture in a commercial MDO framework. This paper provides an overall discussion of the envisioned advisory system and focuses on the knowledge-based technologies, and the implications of their implementation. These technologies make up the backbone of the envisioned advisory system, including a domain-specific ontology for MDO and a reasoning engine to provide the required reasoning capabilities for advice. Preliminary results include an ontology to enable the use of monolithic and distributed MDO architectures/problems and an extension of the reasoning functionalities of an open-source reasoner. Finally, a combination of a rule engine and query mechanism is proposed to support the use of rules on top of the ontology.