1. DEVELOPMENT OF RELIABILITY ANALYSIS AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY
DESIGN OPTIMIZATION (RAMDO) SOFTWARE
Dr. Choi, K.K., Dr. Gaul, N., Dr. Song, H., and Dr. Cho, H.
RAMDO Solutions, LLC
Iowa City, IA 52240
In manufacturing industry and DoD, developing and producing optimized and reliable
products is the primary goal for success of business, reduction of warranty cost, and success of
military operations. As the CAD and CAE tools are advancing, the simulation-based design
process is often used to obtain an optimum design, prior to prototype development, to reduce the
product development cost. However, a design that is deterministically optimized without
inclusion of input uncertainty will be most likely only 50% reliable.
Basic reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) theories and numerical methods have
been developed at the University of Iowa over a number of years in collaboration with the
Automotive Research Center (ARC), which is funded by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive
Research, Development & Engineering Center (TARDEC). In this area of research at Iowa, 9
Ph.D. students were successfully advised to completion; and 48 archived journal papers and 72
conference papers were published. The University of Iowa research team has integrated a
number of numerical methods that they have developed to create the Iowa RBDO (I-RBDO)
software, including a user interface.
Both the sensitivity-based and sampling-based methods for reliability analysis and design
optimization methods are implemented in I-RBDO for broader multidisciplinary applications. I-
RBDO has comprehensive capabilities that include input distribution modeling for both
independent and correlated variables; a variable screening method; local and global window
surrogate modeling method; statistical analysis; interval analysis; reliability analysis; stochastic
design sensitivity analyses; RBDO; and confidence-based RBDO. I-RBDO can be readily
integrated with any CAE solvers for broader multidisciplinary applications.
I-RBDO has been successfully applied by users at various academia, industry, and TARDEC
to optimize design of passenger vehicles for noise, vibration and safety; durability; casting
process design; ship hydrodynamics; fluid structure interaction; welding design; superconducting
magnetic energy storage system; electro-thermal polysilicon actuator; etc.
With the success of I-RBDO, the Iowa team established a start-up company, RAMDO
Solutions, LLC, in fall 2013. Based on the I-RBDO software, the company is developing a
commercial software Reliability Analysis & Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (RAMDO).
The company successfully obtained an Army SBIR funding in June 2014.
For multidisciplinary analysis and reliability-based design optimization (RBDO), a Process
Integration and Design Optimization (PIDO) capability needs to be developed. There are two
key capabilities in PIDO: (1) Process Integration (PI) for seamless integration of diverse
CAD/CAE tools for multidisciplinary analyses; and (2) Design Optimization (DO) for
multidisciplinary RBDO. The RAMDO software is focused on the second capability. The
RAMDO Solutions, LLC will partner with Altair to have RAMDO integrated with HyperStudy.