ABSTRACT
The topic of this chapter is to introduce the subject of designing structural and control systems simultaneously by using an integrated approach. The fields of structural optimization and optimum control have reached a stage of maturity. The methods developed under these fields have been extensively used in different engineering fields. However, the development of a design procedure to combine structural and control design has been quite recent and it is emerging as a new field in the integrated approaches of the design process. The literature shows that there are various formulations proposed by different investigators. The problem is highly nonlinear because of the nature of the objective functions and the constraints and therefore it can be solved only by using iterative numerical techniques even for a small problem with few design variables. For fairly large problems, obtaining a solution becomes computationally intensive. The optimum solutions obtained by an integrated process may be nonunique because of the nonlinearity of the problem.
