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pyMDO: An Object-Oriented Framework for Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

Published: 01 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We present pyMDO, an object-oriented framework that facilitates the usage and development of algorithms for multidisciplinary optimization (MDO). The resulting implementation of the MDO methods is efficient and portable. The main advantage of the proposed framework is that it is flexible, with a strong emphasis on object-oriented classes and operator overloading, and it is therefore useful for the rapid development and evaluation of new MDO methods. The top layer interface is programmed in Python and it allows for the layers below the interface to be programmed in C, C++, Fortran, and other languages. We describe an implementation of pyMDO and demonstrate that we can take advantage of object-oriented programming to obtain intuitive, easy-to-read, and easy-to-develop codes that are at the same time efficient. This allows developers to focus on the new algorithms they are developing and testing, rather than on implementation details. Examples demonstrate the user interface and the corresponding results show that the various MDO methods yield the correct solutions.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software  Volume 36, Issue 4
August 2009
140 pages
ISSN:0098-3500
EISSN:1557-7295
DOI:10.1145/1555386
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2009
Accepted: 01 February 2009
Revised: 01 December 2008
Received: 01 September 2007
Published in TOMS Volume 36, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Multidisciplinary design optimization
  2. object-oriented programming

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