Benchmarking multidisciplinary design optimization algorithms

Abstract A comparison of algorithms for multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) is performed with the aid of a new software framework. This framework, pyMDO, was developed in Python and is shown to be an excellent platform for com-paring the performance of the various MDO methods. pyMDO eliminates the need for reformulation when solving a given problem using different MDO methods: once a problem has been described, it can automatically be cast into any method. In addi-tion, the modular design of pyMDO allows rapid development and benchmarking of new methods. Results generated from this study provide a strong foundation for iden-tifying the performance trends of various methods with several types of problems