Strong coupling of the physical and control parts within complex dynamic systems should be addressed by integrated design approaches that can manage such interactions. Otherwise, the final solution will be suboptimal or even infeasible. Combined design and control (co-design) methods can tackle this issue by managing the mentioned interactions and can result in superior optimal solutions. Current co-design methods are applicable to simplified non-interconnected systems; however, these methods might be impractical or even impossible to apply to real-world interconnected dynamic systems, hindering designers from obtaining the system-level optimal solutions. This work addresses this issue by developing an optimization algorithm which combines a decomposition-based optimization strategy known as analytical target cascading (ATC) with a co-design-centric formulation of multidisciplinary dynamic system design optimization (MDSDO). Considering the time-dependent linking variables among the dynamic systems’ components, a new consistency measure has also been proposed to manage such quantities in the optimization process. Finally, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle powertrain, representative of an interconnected dynamic system, has been studied to validate the new algorithm’s results against the conventional all-at-once (AAO) MDSDO. Although the numerical results from the ATC-MDSDO slightly deviate from those in the AAO-MDSDO, this method can play a crucial role as a benchmark when the AAO solution is unattainable or a distributed design paradigm is required.

Combined plant and control design (control co-design, or CCD) methods are often used during product development to address the synergistic coupling between the plant and control parts of a dynamic system. Recently, a few studies have started applying CCD to stochastic dynamic systems. In their most rigorous approach, reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) principles have been used to ensure solution feasibility under uncertainty. However, since existing reliability-based CCD (RBCCD) algorithms use all-at-once (AAO) formulations, only most-probable-point (MPP) methods can be used as reliability analysis techniques. Though effective for linear/quadratic RBCCD problems, the use of such methods for highly nonlinear RBCCD problems introduces solution error that could lead to system failure. A multidisciplinary feasible (MDF) formulation for RBCCD problems would eliminate this issue by removing the dynamic equality constraints and instead enforcing them through forward simulation. Since the RBCCD problem structure would be similar to traditional RBDO problems, any of the well-established reliability analysis methods could be used. Therefore, in this work, a novel reliability-based MDF formulation of multidisciplinary dynamic system design optimization (RB-MDF-MDSDO) has been proposed for RBCCD. To quantify the uncertainty propagated by the random decision variables, Monte Carlo simulation has been applied to the generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansion of the probabilistic constraints. The proposed formulation is applied to two engineering test problems, with the results indicating the effectiveness of both the overall formulation as well as the reliability analysis technique for RBCCD.

Conventional sequential methods are not bound to yield optimal solutions for design of physical systems and their corresponding control systems. However, by managing the interactions, combined physical and control system design (co-design) can produce superior optimal results. Existing Co-design methods are practical for moderate-scale systems; whereas, they can be impractical or impossible to use when applied to large-scale systems and consequently may limit our determination of an optimal solution. This work addresses this issue by developing a novel decomposition-based version of a co-design algorithm to optimize such large-scale dynamic systems. The new formulation implements a decomposition-based optimization strategy known as Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) to a co-design method known as Multidisciplinary Dynamic System Design Optimization (MDSDO) of a large-scale dynamic system. In addition, a new consistency measure was also established to manage time-dependent linking variables. Results substantiate the ability of the new formulation in identifying the optimal dynamic system solution.

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