In multi-objective topology optimization, a design is defined to be “pareto-optimal” if no other design exists that is better with respect to one objective, and as good with respect to others. This unfortunately suggests that unless other ‘better’ designs are found, one cannot declare a particular topology to be pareto-optimal. In this paper, we first show that a topology can be guaranteed to be (locally) pareto-optimal if certain inherent properties associated with the topological sensitivity field are satisfied, i.e., no further comparison is necessary. This, in turn, leads to a deterministic, i.e., non-stochastic, method for directly tracing pareto-optimal frontiers using the classic fixed-point iteration scheme. The proposed method can generate the full set of pareto-optimal topologies in a single-run, and is therefore both efficient and predictable, as illustrated through numerical examples.
Four-Step Iteration Scheme to Approximate Fixed Point for Weak Contractions
