Optimal Design of Complex Mechanical Systems with Applications to Vehicle Engineering

The book is devoted both to researchers wishing to acquire basic or advanced knowledge on the optimisation of complex mechanical systems (with special reference to multi-objective programming) and to engineers specialist in the field of vehicle design. In the book, reference will be made exclusively to those (complex) mechanical systems which can be described by means of mathematical models. The optimal design of these complex systems implies the proper tuning of many design variables (up to 50 or more) in order to find a preferred compromise among conflicting system’s performances. The number of these performances is also usually very high (up to 20 or more). In the first part of the book, an informative tutorial (Chap. 1) is produced to introduce to the reader the main issues on the optimisation of complex mechanical systems. The subject is explained plainly with the aim to present the key definitions and the basic considerations on the topic. Additionally, the main techniques to solve optimisation problems are briefly presented (without resorting to involved mathematics) to make the reader aware of the actual problem-solving capabilities in the field. All the topics which are mentioned in the informative tutorial (Chap. 1) are dealt with in mathematical form in Chaps. 2–4. In the second part of the book, all the mathematical theories introduced in the first part are applied to solve a number of optimisation problems, many of which refer to ground vehicles. Authors do think that the design or (which is the same) the optimisation of complex mechanical systems is only at its very beginning. Actually, the power of computers is just now becoming nearly sufficient to attempt the solution of such optimisation problems. Possibly, in the future new knowledge will be acquired on the dynamical behaviour of complex systems and consequently new algorithms for optimising them will be developed. Authors envisage that the optimisation of complex mechanical systems will be continuously updated in the near future. The book will remain anyway at least informative on the basic issues on the topic, both with reference to the theory, and with reference to a number of presented optimisation examples.