IOWA DEVELOPED RELIABILITY-BASED DESIGN OPTIMIZATION (I-RBDO) - TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

The recent U.S. Army TARDEC’s 30-Year Strategy calls for enhancing their skill set in the “ilities,” especially reliability, since this factor directly impacts more than 58% of life cycle costs, according to a DoD study. To support this initiative, this paper presents technology transfer of Iowa developed Reliability-Based Design Optimization (I-RBDO) software by integrating theories and numerical methods that have been developed over a number of years in collaboration with the Automotive Research Center (ARC), which is funded by the U.S. Army TARDEC. Both the sensitivity-based and sampling-based methods for reliability analysis and design optimization methods are integrated in I-RBDO for broader multidisciplinary applications. I-RBDO has very comprehensive capabilities that include modeling of input distributions for both independent and correlated variables; a variable screening method for high dimensional RBDO problems; statistical analysis; reliability analysis; RBDO; and confidence-based RBDO. The research software I-RBDO has been provided to selected academia, industry, TARDEC HPC and Army Research Lab (ARL) Dedicated Support Partition (DSP) for testing its effectiveness by applying to various test problems. The Iowa team will continue working with TARDEC and ARL using I-RBDO on HPC and DSP, respectively, for Army applications of I-RBDO. With successful applications of I-RBDO, the Iowa team established a small start-up company to develop a commercial Reliability Analysis & Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (RAMDO) software. The company was awarded an Army SBIR funding contract in May 2014. This commercialization of the ARC funded I-RBDO software represents a major technology transfer for the benefit of the Army. The success of TARDEC led research and development is highlighted by taking a significant multi-year project like this and demonstrating a full transition of the technology to the commercial marketplace.