Professor and PhD graduate talk about how to learn optimization by using ESTECO Academy.
The Importance of Teaching Engineers Multidisciplinary Optimization
Dr. Stefania Gemma, stress and design engineer at Airworks Engineering and researcher at the University of Rome.
As design optimization is becoming more interdisciplinary, many academics are seeing the need to teach engineering students how to use multidisciplinary optimization (MDO) tools.
MDO is a very important skill in a design engineer’s toolbox. With it, engineers are better able to ensure their designs meet all the criteria while properly assessing the tradeoffs of their design decisions.
“Every engineering system presents a multidisciplinary problem,” explained Dr. Stefania Gemma, stress and design engineer at Airworks Engineering and researcher at the University of Rome. “In all engineering fields, designers have to solve moconflicts between different requirements, taking into account interdisciplinary coupling.”
“The current state of the art of single engineering disciplines is quite advanced, but if we significantly want to improve the performance of a system—e.g., aircraft, satellite, car and so on—we need to consider its multidisciplinary nature,” Gemma added. “As a matter of fact, the overall performance of any system is driven by the interactions among different disciplines and subsystems.”
Gemma learned how to use modeFRONTIER while performing her master’s thesis at the University of Rome and as a visiting researcher at NASA for her PhD. The school didn’t supply a course on systems engineering or MDO at the time. To complete her research into multiobjective optimization (MOO) and MDO for aircraft design, she had to attend a course on her own to learn MDO software.
“It helped me to realize that this kind of software is what I was actually looking for. Fortunately, ESTECO client support is very efficient,” said Gemma. “They helped me several times both during my training period and the implementation of my research projects.”
Carla Ferro Marketing & Sales at ESTECO s.p.a noted the company’s long history with academia. She said “[Our] technology has been used for years in academia and for this reason the company decided to launch a dedicated membership program offering training and more along with the software license.” This dedicated program became the ESTECO Academy.
The Challenge of Bringing MDO into the Curriculum
Prof. Andrea Vacca, School of Mechanical Engineering. Image courtesy of Purdue University.
Purdue University mechanical engineering professor Andrea Vacca agrees that more engineers should be learning about MDO. As a result, he is passing that knowledge onto his stuents.
“At the graduate level, I used modeFRONTIER with my students as an optimization research tool,” explained Vacca. “I give my students hints, and in short time, they become very familiar with the program.”
However, Vacca notes that the curriculum is lacking when it comes to teaching optimization.
“We have a graduate-level class at Purdue based on optimization, but they don’t use commercial software,” he said. “The most they would use is a MATLAB toolbox.”
As for the undergraduate students, Vacca knows that the curriculum is packed with barely enough time to cover the basics. However, he is determined to give at least some of his students a taste of how important MDO and MOO tools really are. He singled out a hydraulics class to apply both CAE and optimization tools.
“Using it in class is something I want to introduce as an experiment, but the class I teach is based on hydraulics not optimization. The class does simulate different problems, so I want to have a short section that once you get the model, you try to optimize it into the best model. I would of course use modeFRONTIER, as I’m happy with it for my research.”
Although this Purdue course is available to both graduates and undergraduates, it is only an elective. Therefore, there are a significant number of students graduating from Purdue that will have little to no experience using MDO software.
Nonetheless, Vacca plans to work with the team at the ESTECO Academy to implement the program into his course. The Academy is a portal to online tutorials, content, live events and real-world problems to solve to help teach MDO software.
How to Teach MDO Online
With the ESTECO Academy, students can get an idea about what they are doing with the software and what the optimization process looks like.
“I’ve seen students spend a full day on tutorials, and then they have an idea what they are doing,” said Vacca. “They are not experts at that point, but they have an idea of the goals and what the software is. But it really takes a week with different tutorials to get started and be able to address a problem.”
Vacca notes that even after a week, students can still struggle with adding the right number of constraints and choosing appropriate algorithms for the design of experiments (DOE) and optimization processes. To assess this, he plans on setting up a lab to teach the basics of optimization and DOE algorithms.
“The selection of the optimization algorithm isn’t easy,” explained Vacca. “This isn’t a weakness of the software. I plan to get suggestions from the [numeric methods team] on how to teach this.”
Gemma agrees that the Academy will expedite a student’s education on MDO software. However, she believes that truly mastering the program and optimization will take time after the class.
“Academy wasn’t there yet when I was doing my modeFRONTIER training several years ago, but I think it would be helpful for students and researchers,” she said. “In this way, I suppose, beginners can become proficient modeFRONTIER users in a few months instead of almost years of practice on their own.”
The Academy plans on giving students professional development credits in the future.
“Talking to people in industry, MDO is a skill they appreciate,” said Vacca. “So it would be better if there was some form of development credit or certification. It’s something I’ve also seen from the students. The students are claiming optimization is important too.”
Caterina Moro, Marketing & Sales at ESTECO s.p.a agrees with Vacca. She has noted that more employers are asking them to verify an applicant’s training.
However, Gemma does not believe the Academy’s lack of certification to be a big issue. She suggests that a student’s research should speak for itself.
“In my experience, no certification was ever required by employers,” explained Gemma. “Probably, the best evidence of MDO knowledge is scientific publications. I think that the ability to approach and solve MDO problems can be gained only through practice. Indeed, MDO-MOO theory and techniques are quite easy to understand but are difficult in practice when applied to complex and real problems.”
Though MDO software has been around for years, the Academy is still rather new (launched in September 2015), so Vacca and his students haven’t had the opportunity to look around it in detail. However, he is encouraging his students to use it as a learning tool for MDO and notes that it already has some impressive features.
“The intention to create selective examples and videos while building a community offers a more tailored way to educate the students. It’s ambitious and not so common,” said Vacca.
“Based on my student’s feedback, other software training such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is more painful,” explained Vacca. “But the ESTECO Academy is simplifying the training process. For instance, CFD tools have documentation, but it is very vast, it’s hard to find what you need and the tutorials aren’t always helpful. For CFD, it takes time to get a basic understanding of the software.”
Vacca was also impressed with how students are offered a low-cost licenses to the MDO software. Many students are eligible to receive a free modeFRONTIER license for a year. Otherwise, the yearly cost will be €/$120 for a student, €/$240 for graduates and €/$1,200) for professors.
However, members can also receive sponsored software licenses if they are able to share the content at conferences to highlight the MDO technology. Because these conferences are a good opportunity to meet industry contacts, they could prove to be in a student’s best interests.
A Students’ Need to Know: MDO in Industry
Where MDO Software fits into the system design V model. Image Courtesy of ESTECO.
Given all of the discussion of how MDO is important to engineers, they may be interested in how it might affect their careers.
For instance, should engineers be looking towards the aerospace industry for MDO employment?
Gemma admits that though her research is primarily focused on MDO in aerospace, the automotive industry is where MDO thrives.
“Originally, MDO spurred from aerospace R&Ds, becoming mainstream is still a challenge due to regulation,” said Moro.
Gemma explains that even though the aerospace industry could benefit from MDO, given the narrow margins, heavy constraints and strict regulations they face, the concept hasn’t taken flight.
“A common opinion among industrial people is that the implementation of advanced optimization environments, both for the design of new concepts and for the optimization of existing ones, is not worth the effort and the risk,” said Gemma. “Moreover, design procedures are subject to tight rules, and few new approaches are introduced.”
Gemma suspects that the automotive industry has a more immediate and broad application opportunities for design optimization because of their numerous design projects, tighter schedules and shorter margins than aerospace. In addition, she notes, “the automotive industry can afford risk when it comes to trying new design approaches.”
Another important question MDO students might have is which software to focus on.
“As far as I know, not many software vendors offer such a wide variety of tools for integrated [CAE] and MOO as does modeFRONTIER,” said Gemma. “However, an interesting platform should be mentioned, i.e., openMDAO. It is an open-source framework for optimization being developed at the NASA Glenn Research Center.”
Gemma would prefer to see modeFRONTIER offer more open-sourced options, which would result in engineers being able to design their own optimization methods.
Some benefits that Gemma notes about the software include:
- Continuously updated optimization algorithms
- Ability to connect and manage many CAE tools in order to assess the design
- Ability to couple in-house and third-party software into the optimization process
- Ability to create complex and ad hoc workflows
Therefore, students looking to learn MDO and MOO might be interested in learning from the ESTECO Academy. To learn more, follow this link.
ESTECO has sponsored this post. They have no editorial input. All opinions are ours. —Shawn Wasserman and Roopinder Tara
