An Entropy Weight-Based Lower Confidence Bounding Optimization Approach for Engineering Product Design

Abstract

The optimization design of engineering products involving computationally expensive simulation is usually a time-consuming or even prohibitive process. As a promising way to relieve computational burden, adaptive Kriging-based design optimization (AKBDO) methods have been widely adopted due to their excellent ability for global optimization under limited computational resource. In this paper, an entropy weight-based lower confidence bounding approach (EW-LCB) is developed to objectively make a trade-off between the global exploration and the local exploitation in the adaptive optimization process. In EW-LCB, entropy theory is used to measure the degree of the variation of the predicted value and variance of the Kriging model, respectively. Then, an entropy weight function is proposed to allocate the weights of exploration and exploitation objectively and adaptively based on the values of information entropy. Besides, an index factor is defined to avoid the sequential process falling into the local regions, which is associated with the frequencies of the current optimal solution. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EW- LCB method, several numerical examples with different dimensions and complexities and the lightweight optimization design problem of an underwater vehicle base are utilized. Results show that the proposed approach is competitive compared with state-of-the-art AKBDO methods considering accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.

Keywords

• Kriging
• lower confidence bounding
• entropy theory
• product design
• simulation-based design optimization