Adaptive parallel decomposition for multidisciplinary design

The conceptual design of a rotorcraft system involves many different analysis disciplines. The decomposition of such a system into several subsystems can make analysis and design more efficient in terms of the total computation time. Adaptive parallel decomposition makes the structure of the overall design problem suitable to apply the multidisciplinary design optimization methodologies and it can exploit parallel computing. This study proposes a decomposition method which adaptively determines the number and sequence of analyses in each sub-problem corresponding to the available number of processors in parallel. A rotorcraft design problem is solved and as a result, the adaptive parallel decomposition method shows better performance than other previous methods for the selected design problem.