A non-hierarchical formulation of Analytical Target Cascading

Analytical target cascading (ATC) is a method developed originally for translating system-level design targets to design specications for the components that comprise the system. ATC has been shown to be useful for coordinating decomposition-based optimal system design. The traditional ATC formulation uses hierarchical problem decompositions, in which coordination is performed by communicating target and response values between parents and children. The hierarchical formulation may not be suitable for general multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problems. This paper presents a new ATC formulation that allows non-hierarchical target-response coupling between subproblems and introduces system-wide functions that depend on variables of two or more subproblems. Options to parallelize the subproblem optimizations are also provided, including a new bi-level coordination strategy that uses a master problem formulation. The new formulation increases the applicability of ATC to both decomposition-based optimal system design and MDO. Moreover, it belongs to the class of augmented Lagrangian coordination methods, having thus convergence properties under standard convexity and continuity assumptions. A supersonic business jet design problem is used to demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the presented formulation