Self-Adaptive Stepsize Search Applied To Robust Engineering Design Optimisation

In engineering it is usually necessary to design systems as cheap as possible whilst ensuring that certain constraints are satisfied. Computational optimisation methods can help to find optimal designs. 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 novel meta-method is introduced, which can guide arbitrary optimisation 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 optimisation 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.