Development of a multidisciplinary design optimization test simulator

Many of the method development efforts in the field of multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) attempt to simplify the design of a large, complex system by dividing the system into a series of smaller, simpler, and coupled subsystems. A representative and efficient means of determining the feasibility and robustness of MDO methods is crucial. This paper describes the construct and applications of a test simulator, CASCADE (Complex Application Simulator for the Creation of Analytical Design Equations), that is capable of randomly generating and then converging a system of coupled analytical equations, of user-specified size (Hulme and Bloebaum 1996). CASCADE-generated systems can be used for test sequencing and system reduction strategies, convergence strategies, optimization techniques, MDO methods, and distributed computing techniques (via Parallel Virtual Machine), among others.