An interactive method for the selection of design criteria and the formulation of optimization problems in computer aided optimal design

This paper presents an interactive method for the selection of design criteria and the formulation of optimization problems within a computer aided optimization process of engineering systems. The key component of the proposed method is the formulation of an inverse optimization problem for the purpose of determining the design preferences of the engineer. These preferences are identified based on an interactive modification of a preliminary optimization result that is the solution of an initial problem statement. A formulation of the inverse optimization problem is presented, which is based on a weighted-sum multi-objective approach and leads to an explicit optimization problem that is computationally inexpensive to solve. Numerical studies on structural shape optimization problems show that the proposed method is able to identify the optimization criteria and the formulation of the optimization problem which drive the interactive user modifications.