Multidisciplinary Optimization Formulation for the Optimization of Multirate Systems

Multidisciplinary optimization strategies are widely used in the static case and can be extended to a problem with a time-domain model in order to reduce optimization time. The waveform relaxation method is a fixed-point approach applied to waveforms, which allows the coupling of dynamic models. Using the individual discipline feasibility strategy, the coupling is transferred to the optimization problem and leads to a high decrease of the number of model evaluations compared with the multidisciplinary feasibility strategy. The drawback of this approach might be the increased number of optimization variables, but it is coped through an efficient way to compute the derivatives of time-dependent variables.