Accelerating design optimization using reduced order models

Youngsoo Choi, Geoffrey Oxberry, Daniel White, Trenton Kirchdoerfer

Published 2019-09-25Version 1

Although design optimization has shown its great power of automatizing the whole design process and providing an optimal design, using sophisticated computational models, its process can be formidable due to a computationally expensive large-scale linear system of equations to solve, associated with underlying physics models. We introduce a general reduced order model-based design optimization acceleration approach that is applicable not only to design optimization problems, but also to any PDE-constrained optimization problems. The acceleration is achieved by two techniques: i) allowing an inexact linear solve and ii) reducing the number of iterations in Krylov subspace iterative methods. The choice between two techniques are made, based on how close a current design point to an optimal point. The advantage of the acceleration approach is demonstrated in topology optimization examples, including both compliance minimization and stress-constrained problems, where it achieves a tremendous reduction and speed-up when a traditional preconditioner fails to achieve a considerable reduction in the number of linear solve iterations.