Call for papers: Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Call for papers: Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice from an Industrial and Systems Engineering Perspective

A special issue of European Journal of Industrial Engineering

In recent years, it has been recognised that industry is paying more and more attention to the formalisation of complex system analysis and design by seeking better ways to improve efficiency in the design process to meet time, cost, and performance requirements. Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) has emerged as an industrial and systems engineering discipline that focuses on the development of new design and optimisation strategies for complex systems.

The design and optimisation of complex, high-performance systems require the use of more and more sophisticated modelling tools. Nevertheless, their scope is generally limited to a single disciplinary domain or to specific subsystems. In this context, the search for the best design solution is in general driven by the trade-offs between different teams; each one specialised in a discipline or in a specific system aspect.

The overall optimisation performance is pursued with a number of methodological, organisational, and technical difficulties such as complex modelling and representation issues, computational efforts, and close collaboration between different teams. MDO is considered a methodology for complex systems design that coherently exploits the synergism of mutually interacting phenomena and domains. The main scientific challenges of MDO are concerned with the development of strong and efficient numerical techniques and with the computational organisation required for the necessary coupling of models and tools employed in interacting disciplines.

Interest in MDO has intensified in the last years, as recent advances in computational, optimisation, and simulation technology have presented significant opportunities to solve MDO problems. Different research streams are highlighting many topics of common interest, such as modelling and optimisation methodologies, uncertainty and robustness analysis, integration techniques, approximation and metamodelling methods. Reducing time and cost of the design while pursuing both accuracy and robustness of solutions and the integration between structural and control design aspects is still of primary interest for the project teams. However, the use of these methods for coupled multidisciplinary problems remains an open challenge in many industrial engineering areas, even if innovative methods and software solutions are now available to be used in multidisciplinary applications.

This special issue provides the threefold opportunity to explore new perspectives, to receive a “feedback from the field” trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice of MDO, and to promote and transfer the knowledge of methods for MDO.

We are inviting people from both academia and industry to submit papers on their recent research experience considering emergent approaches and results to be applied to MDO problems.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Development of suitable formulation of multidisciplinary design problems
• Optimisation methods incorporating both structural and control design;
• Simulation-optimisation methods
• Robust optimisation
• Metamodelling methods and metamodels management
• Sensitivity analysis
• Practical applications of MDO techniques

Important Dates
Submission Deadline: 20 December, 2008
Notification of the Initial Decision: 30 March, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 30 June, 2009