A review of concurrent optimisation methods

During the past decades, products and their manufacturing processes have become much more complex than before. This has led to complex optimisation problems that require optimising the complicated product development process or the physical aspects of products with respect to a lot of design variables. A common approach to address these problems is to decompose the problem into a number of simpler sub-problems and optimise each sub-problem concurrently. This idea has been investigated in different research fields, including concurrent engineering (CE) and cooperative coevolution (CC). In this paper, main topics in CE and CC are reviewed, and the relationships between CE and CC are discussed along with some potential combinations between them. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.