Coupling strength-based system reduction for complex engineering design

Abstract

The design process associated with large engineering systems requires an initial decomposition of the complex system into subsystem modules which are coupled through transference of output data. The implementation of such a decomposition approach assumes that the ability exists to determine what subsystems and interactions exist and what order of execution will be imposed during the analysis process. Unfortunately, this is quite often an extremely complex task which may be beyond human ability to efficiently achieve. Further, in optimizing such a coupled system, it is essential to be able to determine which interactions figure prominently enough to significantly affect the accuracy of the optimal solution. The ability to determine “weak” versus “strong” coupling strengths would aid the designer in deciding which couplings could be permanently removed from consideration or which could be temporarily suspended so as to achieve computational savings with minimal loss in solution accuracy. An approach that uses normalized sensitivities to quantify coupling strengths is presented. The approach is applied to a coupled system composed of analytical equations for verification purposes.