Reliability-based collaborative design platform for hydraulic actuation system

This paper presents a reliability-based collaborative design platform (RCDP) for hydraulic actuation system wherein the reliability design and reliability analysis are implemented in whole design process. The central idea of RCDP is to decentralize the complex system into several subsystems, in which the propagation of designed parameters as well as shared parameters are considered throughout the multilevel hierarchy and the integrated optimization can be achieved with distributed optimization. Since system parameters are not necessarily deterministic, the probabilistic design is exploited to guarantee the system performance both in structural strength and reliability in lower level of product design. Upload the local designed parameters that are related to upper level, we can solve the bi-level optimal design problem through establishing the appropriate objective function and constraint. Taking full advantage of inherent interface of commercial design software or developed medial file, RCDP can exchange information, access public data and verify the design variables dynamically within different disciplines so as to achieve the performance-based optimization with reliability constraint. RCDP has clear advantages compared with other single discipline design method, i.e. high interoperability, rapid developing process, well performance verification and enough product uncertainty design. On the basis of several common commercial software, e.g. material, mechanical, dynamics, control, hydraulic and reliability, RCDP provides suitable design flow that can join the multidisciplinary design method and reliability analysis synthetically to satisfy the interdisciplinary requirement. Application of hydraulic actuation system design indicates that the reliability-based collaborative design can give suitable room to accommodate the conflict and coupling among different individual discipline design in time that can save the design time, decrease the loss due to improper design and achieve the design optimization.