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:A vehicle is an engineering system whose successful design requires harmonization of a number of objectives and constraints that, in principle, can be modeled as a constrained optimization in the space of design variables. However, dimensionality of such optimization and the complexity and expense of the underlying analysis suggest a decomposition approach to enable concurrent execution of smaller and more manageable tasks. In order to preserve the couplings that naturally occur among the elements of the whole problem, such optimization by various types of decomposition must include a degree of coordination at the system level. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is a body of methods and techniques for performing the above optimization so as to balance the design considerations at the system and detail levels. The paper is an overview of a few MDO methods selected for their applicability to vehicle systems.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Kodiyalam, S. and Sobieszczanski-Sobieski, J. (2001) 'Multidisciplinary design optimization -some formal methods, framework requirements, and application to vehicle design', Int. J. Vehicle Design (Special Issue), pp. 3-22.

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The NASA Langley MDO method evaluation study seeks to arrive at a set of guidelines for using promising MDO methods by accumulating and analyzing computational data for such methods. The data are collected by conducting a series of reproducible experiments. In the first phase of the study, three MDO methods were implemented in the SIGHT: framework and used to solve a set of ten relatively simple problems. In this paper, we comment on the general considerations for conducting method evaluation studies and report some initial results obtained to date. In particular, although the results are not conclusive because of the small initial test set,