A New Method for the Structural Optimization of Product Families

This paper discusses the problem of structural optimization of product families subjected to multiple load cases, evaluated by computationally costly finite element analysis. Product families generally have a complex composition of shared components that makes individual product optimization difficult as the relation between the shared variables is not always intuitive. More optimal is to treat the problem as a product family optimization problem. For product families subjected to multiple and computationally costly crash loads, however, the optimization problem takes too long time to solve with traditional methods. Therefore, a new optimization algorithm is presented that decomposes the family problem into sub-problems and iteratively reduces the number of sub-problems, decouple and solve them.