A non-nested collaborative optimization method for multidisciplinary design optimization and its application in satellite designs

As a decomposition-based multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) method, collaborative optimization (CO) has been widely applied in aerospace design systems. During the execution process of CO method, subsystem optimizations are nested into the system optimization, and numerous subsystem analyses are thus required to achieve the consistency for entire system. For this problem, a non-nested collaborative optimization (NNCO) method is presented in this paper. In this method, system and subsystem optimizations are conducted sequentially and repeatedly, and system consistency is then coordinated with the use of a loop process by updating penalty parameters. The feasibility of this method was firstly tested in solving common analytical problems, and it was further applied in two MDO problems of an observation satellite as well as a maneuver satellite. All of the results have demonstrated the efficacy of this proposed NNCO method, which indicates that it is effective and suitable for dealing with practical multidisciplinary design problems.