Mixed continuous and discrete catalog-based design modeling and optimization

Product design typically involves a mix of custom, semi-custom, and standard components. A mathematical model of a design problem may also mix custom models and cataloged models that represent standard elements or families of elements. Further, design problem models are often decomposed into subsystems and delegated to appropriate experts, each of whom may use their own preferred modeling and analysis tools. A degree of coupling usually exists between these subsystems so they cannot be optimized independently, yet it can be difficult to understand their integrated system performance. Ideally, it would be possible to link this set of heterogeneous and distributed models to represent the complete product in a way that facilitates rapid exploration of design tradeoffs and global optimization. This paper describes a general object-based system modeling formalism for product design. It allows the convenient integration of custom models, models from catalogs, and a wide variety of software modeling and analysis tools distributed over the Internet. Subsystems operating in different locations using different modeling tools are integrated, and mixed variable optimization using custom, semi-custom and standard elements is made possible. A bottle design problem is implemented using a software prototype called DOME (Distributed Object-based Modeling and Evaluation), linking models in ProEngineer, Excel, TEAM (life-cycle analysis software), and DOME custom models.