ABSTRACT
Reduction of the duration of design and manufacturing processes becomes much more important than reducing the cost of raw material of a product while the required functionality is fulfilled, to reduce the overall cost and to lead to success of a new product. In order to reflect this situation to research and development in design methodology, we must reconstruct the notion of structural and mechanical design optimization. In the past most structural and mechanical design optimization techniques tried to minimize the cost of raw material under certain constraints which are implied from mechanics and manufacturing requirement. However, now, the most important matter is how easily certain design can be improved with minimal effort by design engineers rather than just considering minimization of the cost (i.e. weight) of raw material. In other words it becomes very important to examine how the optimal design can be achieved for solving the minimum cost (weight) problem. In this chapter we shall describe a method to find the optimum with less effort without constructing an excessively large system of design optimization that integrates geometric modeling, finite element analysis, sensitivity analysis, and optimization algorithms.
