DECENTRALIZED OPTIMAL DESIGN USING THE LAGRANGIAN RELAXATION APPROACH

To minimize the coordination efforts among design teams and expedite the design process via parallel workflow, this paper proposes a framework of decentralized optimal design. The framework consists of two major components. The first component is the characterization of team-based interactions in engineering design via the notions of responsibility and controllability. This characterization helps us to understand what kind of role a team can perform in a decentralized design environment. The second component is the application of the Lagrangian relaxation approach to support concurrent decision making (i.e., parallel workflow) during the team-based design process. The framework has been demonstrated through the welded beam design example, and the results are promising in view of future development in this research direction.