A DESIGN METHOD OBTAINING DIVERSE DESIGN SOLUTION SETS FOR THE BOUNDARY CONDITION CHANGE: APPLICATION TO AN ISOLATION SYSTEM

The early phase of design contains uncertain design information. Therefore, the boundary condition of a design problem often change as the design process progresses because of the change and addition of required performance or other constrained condition. Designers need to modify design solutions to accommodate design changes using iterative process until required performances are satisfied. Designers spend many times on design changes in progress at conventional design method because designers try to define design variables as point values up to satisfying required performances several times. In contrast to the conventional design method, set-based design method represents design variables as not point values but ranged values and obtains design solution sets with ranged values. This paper proposes a new design method. That defines design variables as ranged values, obtains diverse design solution sets. The possible distributions from design variables are calculated using PSO to accommodate the boundary condition change and presents designers obtained diverse design solution sets and their possible distributions using GUI. This paper applies the proposed design method to the design problem of the isolation system for vertical earthquake vibration and shows the effectiveness of this study for accommodating the boundary condition change.