Multidisciplinary Design Optimization with Vdot Using MEARS

Abstract

The science of planning, creating, and sustaining effective and affordable infrastructure, supply chain management, and maintenance to support Civil and Government operations throughout the nation and the world is reaching unprecedented requirements to both optimize and carry the necessary bandwidth of information. In virtually every industry, the flow of information becomes the lynchpin and focal point of any true advances in Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO). For this new era of MDO, new paradigms that surpass the existing approaches are needed for the exploitation of interactions among disparate disciplines to improve performance, lower cost, and shorten the product/system design cycle while simultaneously balancing potential changes in priorities. At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), a new software platform has emerged that has the promise to truly implement MDO with the power of the internet and the ability to orchestrate Contractor and Government resources that excel using their own familiar tools. It is called Vdot TM (coined after the first derivative of velocity, or acceleration) and is a commercial-offthe-shelf (COTS) software product offered by ESI Group. The process management methodology that Qualis Corporation has demonstrated and will soon further implement using Vdot TM has the potential to revolutionize MDO.