Temporal Evolution of Design Principles in Engineering Systems: Analogies with Human Evolution

Abstract

Abstract. Optimization of an engineering system or component makes a series of changes in the initial random solution(s) iteratively to form the final optimal shape. When multiple conflicting objectives are considered, recent studies on innovization revealed the fact that the set of Pareto-optimal solutions portray certain common design principles. In this paper, we consider a 14-variable bi-objective design optimization of a MEMS device and identify a number of such common design principles through a recently proposed automated innovization procedure. Although these design principles are found to exist among near-Paretooptimal solutions, the main crux of this paper lies in a demonstration of temporal evolution of these principles during the course of optimization. The results reveal that certain important design principles start to evolve early on, whereas some detailed design principles get constructed later during optimization. Interestingly, there exists a simile between evolution of design principles with that of human evolution. Such information about the hierarchy of key design principles should enable designers to have a deeper understanding of their problems.

Temporal Innovization: Evolution of Design Principles Using Multi-objective Optimization

“…In order to exhibit hierarchy during evolution, the design problem should be closer to the real-world, so that the multi-objective optimizer being used 'struggles' to build design principles during optimization thus bringing their hierarchy into the picture. In the next section, we reproduce the results obtained in [5] where the problem was shown to possess a hierarchy in the evolution of design principles.…”

“…The detailed procedure was laid out in [5]. The goal of this paper is to perform temporal innovization on various engineering design problems in order to support and extend the results provided in [5].…”

“…The detailed procedure was laid out in [5]. The goal of this paper is to perform temporal innovization on various engineering design problems in order to support and extend the results provided in [5]. Specifically, we investigate if there exists a gradual evolution of design principles over generations of an MOEA, in the same way that anthropological features of humans developed gradually over millions of years.…”

“…Their progress towards trade-off front at some specific generations is shown in Figure 4. The design principles obtained through automated innovization are discussed in detail in [5]. Figure 5 shows the significance values for each of the 13 design principles at various generations.…”

An integrated approach to automated innovization for discovering useful design principles: Case studies from engineering

“…These information are simplistic and 'thumb-rule' like and importantly none of these information was available before. Based on these results, we suggest further and immediate application of the proposed integrated innovization procedure and its extensions (such as lower-level innovization, higher-level innovization [34] and temporal evolution [72]) to other and more complex engineering design problems.…”