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On Practical Automated Engineering Design

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Seminal Contributions to Modelling and Simulation

Part of the book series: Simulation Foundations, Methods and Applications ((SFMA))

Abstract

In engineering, it is usually necessary to design systems as cheap as possible whilst ensuring that certain constraints are satisfied. Computational optimization methods can help to find optimal designs automatically. However, it is demonstrated in this work that an optimal design is often not robust against variations caused by the manufacturing process, which would result in unsatisfactory product quality. In order to avoid this, a meta-method is used in here, which can guide arbitrary optimization algorithms towards more robust solutions. This was demonstrated on a standard benchmark problem, the pressure vessel design problem, for which a robust design was found using the proposed method together with self-adaptive stepsize search , an optimization algorithm with only one control parameter to tune . The drop-out rate of a simulated manufacturing process was reduced by 30 % whilst maintaining near-minimal production costs, demonstrating the potential of the proposed method.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Science, WE Applied Computer Science, Jade University of Applied Science, Friedrich-Paffrath-Straße 101, 26389, Wilhelmshaven, Germany

    Lars Nolle

  2. Siemens AG, Energy Management, EM MS S SO PR, Mozartstrasse 31c, 91052, Erlangen, Germany

    Ralph Krause

  3. School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, NG11 8NS, Nottingham, UK

    Richard J. Cant

Authors
  1. Lars Nolle
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  2. Ralph Krause
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  3. Richard J. Cant
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lars Nolle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, United Kingdom

    Khalid Al-Begain

  2. ECMS, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Andrzej Bargiela

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Nolle, L., Krause, R., Cant, R.J. (2016). On Practical Automated Engineering Design. In: Al-Begain, K., Bargiela, A. (eds) Seminal Contributions to Modelling and Simulation. Simulation Foundations, Methods and Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33786-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33786-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33785-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33786-9

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