Reliability-Based Design Optimization of Complex Problems With Multiple Design Points via Narrowed Search Region

2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yutian Wang ◽  
Peng Hao ◽  
Zhendong Guo ◽  
Dachuan Liu ◽  
Qiang Gao

Abstract The expensive computational cost is always a major concern for reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) of complex problems. The performance of RBDO can be lowered by the inaccuracy of reliability analysis (RA) which is caused by multiple local optimums and multiple design points in highly non-linear space. In order to reduce the computational burden and guarantee the accuracy of RA (and thus to improve the RBDO performance), a global RBDO algorithm by adopting an improved constraint boundary sampling (GRBDO-ICBS) method is proposed. Specifically, the GRBDO-ICBS method first narrows the concerned search region by using a Kriging-based global search. The accuracies of the design points are verified by the expected risk function (ERF), and the corresponding inaccurate design points are added into training samples to update Kriging. Then a multi-start gradient-based sequential RBDO is carried out, which tries to find out all multiple design points in the concerned search region. The performance of GRBDO-ICBS is demonstrated by four examples. All results have shown that the proposed method can achieve similar accuracy as Monte Carlo simulation (MCS)-based RBDO but with a much lower computational cost.

2013 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric J. Paulson ◽  
Ryan P. Starkey

Complex system acquisition and its associated technology development have a troubled recent history. The modern acquisition timeline consists of conceptual, preliminary, and detailed design followed by system test and production. The evolving nature of the estimates of system performance, cost, and schedule during this extended process may be a significant contribution to recent issues. The recently proposed multistage reliability-based design optimization (MSRBDO) method promises improvements over reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) in achieved objective function value. In addition, its problem formulation more closely resembles the evolutionary nature of epistemic design uncertainties inherent in system design during early system acquisition. Our goal is to establish the modeling basis necessary for applying this new method to the engineering of early conceptual/preliminary design. We present corrections in the derivation and solutions to the single numerical example problem published by the original authors, Nam and Mavris, and examine the error introduced under the reduced-order reliability sampling used in the original publication. MSRBDO improvements over the RBDO solution of 10–36% for the objective function after first-stage optimization are shown for the original second-stage example problem. A larger 26–40% improvement over the RBDO solution is shown when an alternative comparison method is used than in the original. The specific implications of extending the method to arbitrary m-stage problems are presented, together with a solution for a three-stage numerical example. Several approaches are demonstrated to mitigate the computational cost increase of MSRBDO over RBDO, resulting in a net decrease in calculation time of 94% from an initial MSRBDO baseline algorithm.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (06) ◽  
pp. 1950018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li-Xiang Zhang ◽  
Xin-Jia Meng ◽  
He Zhang

Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) has been widely used in mechanical design. However, the treatment of various uncertainties and associated computational burden are still the main obstacle of its application. A methodology of RBDO under random fuzzy and interval uncertainties (RFI-RBDO) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed methodology, two reliability analysis approaches, respectively named as FORM-[Formula: see text]-URA and interpolation-based sequential performance measurement approach (ISPMA), are developed for the mixed uncertainties assessment, and a parallel-computing-based SOMUA (PCSOMUA) method is proposed to reduce the computational cost of RFI-RBDO. Finally, two examples are provided to verify the validity of the methods.


2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (02) ◽  
pp. 120-128
Author(s):  
Hezhen Yang ◽  
Aijun Wang

A methodology for fatigue reliability based design optimization is proposed for the design of bending stiffener. Bending stiffener is employed to protect the upper connection of umbilical/flexible riser against damage from overbending. It is prone to cause fatigue failure due to the wave induced vessel motions. Therefore, its fatigue character has a great impact on the safety of oil and gas production and we should pay more attention to it. In addition, the fatigue analysis involves material, geometric, and loading uncertainties, hence the reliability analysis is performed for considering the influence of uncertain factors. In this work, the fatigue reliability based optimization involves the fatigue analysis and complex optimization algorithms the metamodel is used to reduce the computational cost. Threemetamodels are constructed by the optimum Latin hypercube method. Then, the optimum metamodel is selected for the optimization through the accuracy evaluation. The feasibility of the methodology is verified by a test case of beam. Finally, it is applied to the fatigue reliability based design optimization of bending stiffener. The results demonstrate that this methodology is rational and improves the fatigue reliability of bending stiffener. First, compared with deterministic optimization.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Einar S. Stieng ◽  
Michael Muskulus

Abstract. The need for cost effective support structure designs for offshore wind turbines has led to continued interest in the development of design optimization methods. So far, almost no studies have considered the effect of uncertainty, and hence probabilistic constraints, on the support structure design optimization problem. In this work, we present a general methodology that implements recent developments in gradient-based design optimization, in particular the use of analytical gradients, within the context of reliability-based design optimization methods. By an assumed factorization of the uncertain response into a design-independent, probabilistic part and a design-dependent, but completely deterministic part, it is possible to computationally decouple the reliability analysis from the design optimization. Furthermore, this decoupling makes no further assumption about the functional nature of the stochastic response, meaning that high fidelity surrogate modeling through Gaussian process regression of the probabilistic part can be performed while using analytical gradient-based methods for the design optimization. We apply this methodology to several different cases based around a uniform cantilever beam and the OC3 Monopile and different loading and constraints scenarios. The results demonstrate the viability of the approach in terms of obtaining reliable, optimal support structure designs and furthermore show that in practice only a limited amount of additional computational effort is required compared to deterministic design optimization. While there are some limitations in the applied cases, and some further refinement might be necessary for applications to high fidelity design scenarios, the demonstrated capabilities of the proposed methodology show that efficient reliability-based optimization for offshore wind turbine support structures is feasible.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Einar S. Stieng ◽  
Michael Muskulus

Abstract. The need for cost-effective support structure designs for offshore wind turbines has led to continued interest in the development of design optimization methods. So far, almost no studies have considered the effect of uncertainty, and hence probabilistic constraints, on the support structure design optimization problem. In this work, we present a general methodology that implements recent developments in gradient-based design optimization, in particular the use of analytical gradients, within the context of reliability-based design optimization methods. Gradient-based optimization is typically more efficient and has more well-defined convergence properties than gradient-free methods, making this the preferred paradigm for reliability-based optimization where possible. By an assumed factorization of the uncertain response into a design-independent, probabilistic part and a design-dependent but completely deterministic part, it is possible to computationally decouple the reliability analysis from the design optimization. Furthermore, this decoupling makes no further assumption about the functional nature of the stochastic response, meaning that high-fidelity surrogate modeling through Gaussian process regression of the probabilistic part can be performed while using analytical gradient-based methods for the design optimization. We apply this methodology to several different cases based around a uniform cantilever beam and the OC3 Monopile and different loading and constraint scenarios. The results demonstrate the viability of the approach in terms of obtaining reliable, optimal support structure designs and furthermore show that in practice only a limited amount of additional computational effort is required compared to deterministic design optimization. While there are some limitations in the applied cases, and some further refinement might be necessary for applications to high-fidelity design scenarios, the demonstrated capabilities of the proposed methodology show that efficient reliability-based optimization for offshore wind turbine support structures is feasible.


2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meng Li ◽  
Mohammadkazem Sadoughi ◽  
Chao Hu ◽  
Zhen Hu ◽  
Amin Toghi Eshghi ◽  
...  

Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) aims at optimizing the design of an engineered system to minimize the design cost while satisfying reliability requirements. However, it is challenging to perform RBDO under high-dimensional uncertainty due to the often prohibitive computational burden. In this paper, we address this challenge by leveraging a recently developed method for reliability analysis under high-dimensional uncertainty. The method is termed high-dimensional reliability analysis (HDRA). The HDRA method optimally combines the strengths of univariate dimension reduction (UDR) and kriging-based reliability analysis to achieve satisfactory accuracy with an affordable computational cost for HDRA problems. In this paper, we improve the computational efficiency of high-dimensional RBDO by pursuing two new strategies: (i) a two-stage surrogate modeling strategy is adopted to first locate a highly probable region of the optimum design and then locally refine the accuracy of the surrogates in this region; and (ii) newly selected samples are updated for all the constraints during the sequential sampling process in HDRA. The results of two mathematical examples and one real-world engineering example suggest that the proposed HDRA-based RBDO (RBDO-HDRA) method is capable of solving high-dimensional RBDO problems with higher accuracy and comparable efficiency than the UDR-based RBDO (RBDO-UDR) and ordinary kriging-based RBDO (RBDO-kriging) methods.


2012 ◽  
Vol 544 ◽  
pp. 223-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhen Zhong Chen ◽  
Hao Bo Qiu ◽  
Hong Yan Hao ◽  
Hua Di Xiong

Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) evaluates variation of output induced by uncertainties of design variables and results in an optimal design while satisfying the reliability requirements. However, its use in practical applications is hindered by the huge computational cost during the evaluation of structure reliability. In this paper, the reliability index based decoupling method is developed to improve the efficiency of probabilistic optimization. The reliability index is used to calculate the shifting vector in the decoupling process, due to its efficiency in evaluating violated probabilistic constraints. The computation capability of the proposed method is demonstrated using two examples, which are widely used to test RBDO methods. The comparison results show that the proposed method has the same accuracy as the existing methods, and it is also very efficient.


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