Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) Methods: Their Synergy with Computer Technology in the Design Process

The paper identifies speed, agility, human interface, generation of sensitivity information, task decomposition, and data transmission (including storage) as important attributes for a computer environment to have in order to support engineering design effectively. It is argued that when examined in terms of these attributes the presently available environment can be shown to be inadequate. A radical improvement is needed, and it may be achieved by combining new methods that have recently emerged from multidisciplinary design optimisation (MDO) with massively parallel processing computer technology. The caveat is that, for successful use of that technology in engineering computing, new paradigms for computing will have to be developed - specifically, innovative algorithms that are intrinsically parallel so that their performance scales up linearly with the number of processors. It may be speculated that the idea of simulating a complex behaviour by interaction of a large number of very simple models may be an inspiration for the above algorithms; the cellular automata are an example. Because of the long lead time needed to develop and mature new paradigms, development should begin now, even though the widespread availability of massively parallel processing is still a few years away.