A TOOL FOR DESIGN EXPLORATION AND OPTIMIZATION WITH DYNAMIC POWERTRAIN SIMULATION MODELS

Powertrain system design and integration for ground vehicles is often accomplished using a dynamic simulation to evaluate vehicle performance. This paper applies modern multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization methods to facilitate powertrain system design through dynamic simulation analysis. A collection of surrogate modeling-based MDAO tools are applied to a representative powertrain example to explore the available design space, analyze the feasibility of system performance goals, and make decisions about systems design. Surrogate modeling is shown to facilitate visualization, information synthesis, and decision making in a highly dimensional design problem. Surrogate-based optimization is also demonstrated on the example powertrain design problem to uncover a Pareto frontier of design options for further analysis.