CRPC-TR98780						September 1998

Title: Managing Surrogate Objectives to Optimize a Helicopter Rotor Design
- Further Experiements

Authors: Andrew J. Booker, Paul D. Frank, J. E. Dennis, Douglas W. Moore,
and David B. Serafini

Submitted November 1998; available as AIAA MDO 98-4717

Abstract:
It is common engineering practice to use response surface approximations
as surrogates for an expensive objective function in engineering design.
The rationale is to reduce the number of detailed, costly analyses
required during optimization. In earlier work, we developed a rigorous and
effective scheme for managing the interplay between the use of surrogates
in the optimization and scheduled progress checks with the expensive
analysis so that the process converges to a solution of the original
design problem.  In this paper, we will report our latest numerical tests
with a helicopter rotor design problem which has proved to be a fruitful
laboratory for experimentation.  The results given here support the use of
an ANOVA decomposition on a DACE model to identify the most important
optimization variables in an optimal design problem.

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Andrew J. Booker			Paul D. Frank
booker@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com		frank@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com
Mathematics & Engineering Analysis
Boeing Shared Services Group

J. E. Dennis, Jr.			Douglas W. Moore
dennis@caam.rice.edu			dougm@caam.rice.edu
Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics
Rice University

David B. Serafini
dbs@nersc.gov
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory