A FRAMEWORK FOR CAPTURING DEGRADATION BEHAVIOR IN RELIABILITY-BASED ROBUST DESIGN OPTIMIZATION

The increasing customer awareness and global competition have forced manufacturers to capture the entire life cycle issues during product design and development stage. The thorough understanding of product behavior (degradation process) and various uncertainties associated with product performance is paramount to produce reliable and robust design. This paper proposes a multi-objective framework for reliability-based robust design optimization, which captures degradation behavior of quality characteristics to provide optimal design parameters. The objective function of the multi-objective optimization problem is defined as quality loss function considering both desirable and undesirable deviations between target values and the actual results. The degradation behavior is captured by using empirical model to estimate amount of degradation accumulated in time t. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by considering a leaf spring design problem.