Managing Function Constraints in Design Sheet™
Abstract Design Sheet™ is a constraint management system specially designed for doing conceptual design cost and performance tradeoff studies. It represents the design models as constraints between design variables, and uses graph-theoretic algorithms to decompose large systems of nonlinear equations into smaller pieces that can be solved robustly. This paper describes extensions to Design Sheet that enable it to manage functions as variables in a constraint network. The paper also discusses the new capabilities of function encapsulation and explicit differentiation that are built on top of these extensions. The ability to encapsulate a part of the constraint network into a function, and use it in other constraints, promotes model reuse and improves computational efficiency. The capability to automatically differentiate certain variables with respect to other design variables allows Design Sheet to be used for solving practical optimization problems. In combination with the tradeoff capability, this enables the designer to track changing optima in trade studies. The paper also provides a couple of optimization examples to demonstrate these new capabilities.