A reliability based multidisciplinary design optimization method with multi-source uncertainties

The complexity of engineering systems is increasing greatly, and more coupled disciplines and multi-source uncertainties are involved in the design and development of complex engineered systems (CESs). Actually, uncertainties are ubiquitous in design of CESs, which can be mainly classified into alteatory uncertainty (AU) and epistemic uncertainty (EU). To gain high reliability and safety of CESs, the Reliability-based MDO (RBMDO) which considers uncertainties of design variables and parameters has become a hot research topic. In this paper, the quantification of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties based on the probability theory and convex set-theory, multidisciplinary comprehensive reliability evaluation index, adaptive collaborative optimization strategy based on the intelligent optimization algorithm, sequential multidisciplinary reliability analysis method based on the concurrent subspace optimization (CSSO) and performance measure approach (PMA), and hierarchical and hybrid sequential optimization and reliability assessment (HSORA) RBMDO strategy under multi-source uncertainties have been researched. All of the researches can expand and improve the RBMDO theoretical system, and also provide the effective method for the design and optimization of CESs under multi-source uncertainties.