Robustness and reliability consideration in product design optimization under uncertainty

Robustness and reliability are two important issues to be considered in product design optimization under uncertainty. Robustness is used to counter manufacturing variation and improve product quality, and reliability is used to maintain structure design feasibility by probabilistic constraints. This paper considers robustness and reliability simultaneously by a multi-objective reliability-based robust design optimization (RBRDO) problem. A Pareto frontier optimization strategy is employed to indicate the trade off tendency between two objectives. To enhance the efficiency of RBRDO, a constraint moving approach is proposed to convert probabilistic constraints into deterministic constraints. An I-beam case study illustrating RBRDO framework and applicability is proposed in the paper, the result is a Pareto frontier to trade off robustness and performance value.