Designer’s preferences regarding equality constraints in robust design optimization

Abstract

Robust design optimization (RDO) problems can generally be formulated by appropriately incorporating uncertainty into the corresponding deterministic optimization problems. Equality constraints in the deterministic problem need to be carefully formulated into the RDO problem because of the strictness associated with their feasibility. In this context, equality constraints have been generally classified into two types: (1) those that must be satisfied regardless of uncertainty, examples include physics-based constraints, such as F = ma, and (2) those that cannot be satisfied because of uncertainty, which are typically designer-imposed, such as dimensional constraints. This paper addresses the notion of preferred degree of satisfaction of deterministic equality constraints under uncertainty. Whether or not a particular equality constraint can be exactly satisfied depends on the statistical nature of the design variables that exist in the constraint and on the designer’s preferences. In this context, this paper puts forth three contributions. First, we develop a comprehensive classification of equality constraints in a way that is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Second, we present a rank-based matrix approach to interactively classify equality constraints, which systematically incorporates the designer’s preferences into the classification process. Third, we present an approach to incorporate the designer’s intra-constraint and inter-constraint preferences for designer-imposed constraints into the RDO formulation. Intra-constraint preference expresses how closely a designer wishes to satisfy a particular constraint; for example, in terms of its mean and standard deviation. A designer may express inter-constraint preference if satisfaction of a particular designer-imposed constraint is more important than that of another. We present an optimization formulation that incorporates the above discussed constraint preferences, which provides the designer with the means to explore design space possibilities. The formulation entails interesting implications in terms of decision making. Two engineering examples are provided to illustrate the practical usefulness of the developments proposed in this paper.