Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

Multi-disciplinary Optimisation (MDO) is a design method becoming increasingly popular in the automotive industry. MDO is the process by which an engineering model, such as a model of vehicle test crash performance, vehicle stiffness, mass or even fluid dynamics, is optimised with respect to more than one discipline, for example, more than one discipline of physics, or entirely different disciplines such as physics and chemistry. To do this with today’s desktop computing power, it is necessary to pre-compute results for a large number of parameterised models, which is not only a time-consuming process but leads to a huge amount of output data.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is, therefore, a necessity for MDO. The application of HPC to MDO allows design engineers to analyse more model variants under more test conditions with far less manual intervention. In turn, this signifi cantly increases engineers’ productivity and allows for a better, safer vehicle design.

Download full PDF 128KB