Application of collaborative optimisation in the structural system design of underwater vehicles

Collaborative optimisation is a new architecture for multidisciplinary design optimisation (MDO) problems of large-scale complex engineering systems. In this paper, collaborative optimisation is applied to the structural system design of underwater vehicles. The design of structural system is cast in the collaborative optimisation architecture and decomposed into three subspaces: pressure hull, exostructure and performance. The architecture involves a system-level optimiser and three subspace-level optimisers corresponding to each subspace. The solution is obtained after 66 system-level iterations.