Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO): A promising tool for the design of HOV

MDO has been used for a variety of applications in such as aerospace,aircraft, and automobile industries as an efficient methodology of design optimization.The human occupied vehicle (HOV) design is related to several disciplines such as hydrodynamics,structural mechanics and control theory.There are the aims of maximizing performance under technology constrains and minimizing cost under performance constraints.However,the current design of HOV is the one that only is integrated the results of all disciplines,not an optimization design.With the traditional design approach, there is no guarantee that a systems-level focus will be taken and "feasibility"rather than "optimality" is commonly all that is achieved.To improve the HOV design and to solve the problem, application of multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) is proposed.Using MDO methods can cast a HOV conceptual design problem into an optimization framework.This paper introduces the history of MDO, its theory and discusses the problem how to apply MDO in HOV design.