Experience in Multidisciplinary Design Education

Recently multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) has become recognized as a new and important disci-pline in engineering. We have been conducting research in this area for a number of years. In doing the research we have had graduate students working in MDO teams for a decade. We have also introduced MDO into the undergraduate curriculum. We started with a pilot project in MDO in 1990-91, working with one senior design team. After this experience we started using smaller, more well defined MDO problems. We formed a center in 1993: The Multidisciplinary Analysis and Design Center for Advanced Vehicles (the MAD Cen-ter). In the fall of 1994 we began offering a senior-grad-uate level course called Multidisciplinary Design Opti-mization. We have also started a formal graduate MDO certificate program This paper discusses our experienc-es with these efforts