Designing a family of reconfigurable vehicles using multilevel multidisciplinary design optimization

Continuous advancements in technology have resulted in customers expecting enhanced performance across multiple operating conditions. In this paper, the desire to meet a variety of objectives after the system has been deployed is accomplished through the design of reconfigurable systems. However, permitting a system to adapt increases both complexity and cost. If this increase is too large, only a subset of design variables can be made adaptable. A multilevel multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) approach is presented to determine the core architecture for a family of three reconfigurable vehicles when accommodating a changing number of adaptable design variables. To illustrate this approach, a case study involving a three-driver racing team is introduced. A common architecture is determined for the three vehicle variants, resulting in lap-time performance increases of 2.08%, 3.27%, and 3.67% when compared to the static, optimized baseline vehicle. The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of combining reconfigurability with product platforming and MDO.