A study on multi-level structural optimum design using qualitative sensitivities

Multidisciplinary optimum designs have been of strong interest lately in many fields. Even in structural design, it is important to carry out optimization from the primary part of design to the detail design in order to obtain the sophisticated design. However, just like multidisciplinary optimum design, transmissions of information and decisions by the designers based on them influence greatly the final design results. To smooth those processes, one possibility is to apply the same optimization methodology from the primary part of design to the detail design. In this study, we applied the qualitative optimization from the preliminary design to the detail design as multi-level optimization and shows the effectiveness to carry out different types of optimization in the same method and the usefulness of the qualitative optimization in the proposed concept.