Model-Based Systems Analysis and Engineering: Standard Evaluator

The standard evaluator enables the full description of a discipline analyses used in a Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) assembly including any relevant options. It also enables assembling an MDAO assembly from a textual description, it’s state from a HDF5 file, and optimization definition from a third textual description. These descriptions are independent of any specific MDAO framework, even though the current implementation that was developed as part of the contract is leveraging the NASA OpenMDAO framework.

This enables replacing components inside an assembly in a programmatic and simple way, for example to replace a group of computationally expensive analyses with a surrogate model or a simplified analysis. It also allows to create an assembly via a textual description and paves the way to build a GUI for creating and editing the assembly.

This, together with the ability to define the optimization problems to be solved in an MDAO problem via a textual and standardized format, allows the capture and version control of MDAO studies. This becomes a key enabler of integration with the digital thread and modern development processes.

This paper describes the need for programmatically defining options for components in an MDAO assembly, especially when wanting to run components that are hosted remotely and not within the same computing environment / memory space of the MDAO framework.

We further describe the independent assembly definition that was developed and implemented as a Python library and show multiple examples of using this definition and the library.