• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.236-245
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• 2011

Many researchers have recently studied multi-level formulation strategies to solve the MDO problems and they basically distributed the coupling compatibilities across all disciplines, while single-level formulations concentrate all the controls at the system-level. In addition, approximation techniques became remedies for computationally expensive analyses and simulations. This paper studies comparisons of the MDO methods with respect to computing performance considering both conventional sequential and modem distributed/parallel processing environments. The comparisons show Individual Disciplinary Feasible (IDF) formulation is the most efficient for sequential processing and IDF with approximation (IDFa) is the most efficient for parallel processing. Results incorporating to popular design examples show this finding. The author suggests design engineers should firstly choose IDF formulation to solve MDO problems because of its simplicity of implementation and not-bad performance. A single drawback of IDF is requiring more memory for local design variables and coupling variables. Adding cheap memories can save engineers valuable time and effort for complicated multi-level formulations and let them free out of no solution headache of Multi-Disciplinary Analysis (MDA) of the Multi-Disciplinary Feasible (MDF) formulation.