A Reliability-Based Formulation for Simulation-Based Control Co-Design Using Generalized Polynomial Chaos Expansion

Combined plant and control design (control co-design (CCD)) methods are often used during product development to address the synergistic coupling between the plant and control parts of a dynamic system. Recently, a few studies have started applying CCD to stochastic dynamic systems. In their most rigorous approach, reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) principles have been used to ensure solution feasibility under uncertainty. However, since existing reliability-based CCD (RBCCD) algorithms use all-at-once formulations, only most-probable-point (MPP) methods can be used as reliability analysis techniques. Though effective for linear/quadratic RBCCD problems, the use of such methods for highly nonlinear RBCCD problems introduces solution error that could lead to system failure. A multidisciplinary feasible (MDF) formulation for RBCCD problems would eliminate this issue by removing the dynamic equality constraints and instead enforcing them through forward simulation. Since the RBCCD problem structure would be similar to traditional RBDO problems, any of the well-established reliability analysis methods could be used. Therefore, in this work, a novel reliability-based MDF formulation of multidisciplinary dynamic system design optimization has been proposed for RBCCD. To quantify the uncertainty propagated by the random decision variables, Monte Carlo simulation has been applied to the generalized polynomial chaos expansion of the probabilistic constraints. The proposed formulation is applied to two engineering test problems, with the results indicating the effectiveness of both the overall formulation as well as the reliability analysis technique for RBCCD.