Application of an Interior Point Sequential Approximate Optimization Method to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Simulation based design has become a major tool in the design of automotive, aerospace and consumer products. Designers are faced with the continuous challenge of reducing manufacturing costs and design cycle times while improving the systems performance and reliability. Simulation based design plays an increasingly prominent role in facilitating the conceptualization and realization of products under these competitive conditions. Single discipline simulations used for analysis are being coupled together to create complex coupled simulation systems. The computational cost of executing a single complex coupled simulation make these problems very expensive for optimization. In some cases, the engineer has to design under a time constraint and therefore the optimization process may be terminated prematurely. For this case an algorithm that provides a feasible design at each iteration would be desirable. In this paper, we will give a brief description of the AUV simulation model as well as detail the use of an Interior Point Trust-Region Sequential Approximate Optimization (IP-TR-SAO) method to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Simulation that is both computationally expensive and noisy; an ideal application of the IP-TR-SAO framework.