An improved critical constraint method for structural optimization of product families

This paper discusses important improvements in the efficient Critical Constraint Method (CCM) for the optimization of structural product families subjected to multiple crash load cases. The method was first presented by A-man and Nilsson (Struct Multidisc Optim 41(5):797-815, 2010). However, the algorithm often converged towards an infeasible solution, which considerably limited the applicability of the method. Therefore, improvements are presented here to make the method more robust regarding feasible solutions, resulting in only a minor decrease in efficiency compared to the original method. The improvements include; a penalty approach to control the feasibility of the method by continuously pushing the solution out of the infeasible region, a dynamic contraction algorithm to increase the accuracy and robustness of the method by considering the optimization progress and variable history in the reduction of the step size, and the implementation of a parallel approach to further increase the efficiency of the method by enabling the full potential of large-scale computer clusters. Finally, the potential of the improved CCM algorithm is demonstrated on a large-scale industrial family optimization problem and it is concluded that the high efficiency of the method enables the usage of large product family optimization in the design process.