History
Shape optimization, as a software process and tool, first appeared as an algorithm in 1995 and as commercial software for the automotive industry by 1998, as noted by F. Muyl. Relative to the age of the automotive and aeronautical companies, this software is very new. The difficulty was not with the science behind the process, but rather the capabilities of computer hardware. In 1998, F. Muyl developed a compromise between exact accuracy and computational time to reduce drag of an automotive. GA phases are the standard genetic algorithm iterations and the BFGS phases are the approximated calculations designed to save time. However, he acknowledged that the computational time required on existing hardware, nearly two weeks for a moderate improvement on an oversimplified proof of concept model, made it unattractive for commercial purposes. He also recognized that improving the modeling implementation to use automatic partial derivatives might improve the computational time, particularly with specialized hardware. In 2000, after a couple years of computer hardware development, K. Maute introduced a more accurate system that could optimize an aircraft wing quickly enough for commercial use.
Read more about this topic: Wing-shape Optimization
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