Publications Details
Analysis driven mechanical redesign
This paper documents an effort to use a constrained nonlinear optimization package (OptdesX) to drive a feature-based mechanical design system (Pro/Engineer) in an optimization loop. Optimizations performed in this manner can maximally respect the design intent built into the model, and eliminate the need to propagate optimization results back to design, a flaw of most current optimization systems. A prototype system was built to demonstrate the capability; use of the prototype uncovered a variety of issues that should be addressed to productionize this kind of capability.