Recent advances in engineering design optimisation: Challenges and future trends

Traditional engineering design optimisation which is the process of identifying the right combination of product parameters is often done manually, time consuming and involves a step by step approach. This paper identifies recent approaches to automating the manual optimisation process and the challenges that it presents to the engineering community. Engineering design optimisation is classified based on design evaluation effort and degrees of freedom viewpoints. An overview of different approaches for design optimisation is presented. The study identifies scalability as the major challenge for design optimisation techniques. Large-scale optimisation requires significant computing power and efficient algorithms such as swarm intelligence.