Preface

This book is intended for the user who needs to become quickly familiar with Product Engineering Optimizer product.

This overview provides the following information:

Product Engineering Optimizer a Nutshell

Optimization plays a prominent role in structural design. The importance of minimum weight design of structures is recognized in most industries because the weight of the system affects its performance or because of the depletion of our conventional energy sources. But optimization is not only a matter of weight, it can be used to optimize any type of data. In real world engineering problems, it is also common to minimize an objective function describing data such as the total volume, the life-time or the cost of a structure. 

The Product Engineering Optimizer is the CATIA answer to optimization. It provides engineers who design structures with an easy-to-use tool based on iterative methods. Using the Product Engineering Optimizer is mainly a question of practice and methodology.  

The Product Engineering Optimizer can operate with 2 types of algorithms: Local algorithms (Conjugate Gradient) and a global algorithm (Simulated Annealing).You select one or the other to run an optimization depending on the function to analyze. Although it is not required to have a prior preparation in optimization techniques, those of you who want to know in detail how these algorithms work can refer to the publications below:

 
  • Numerical Recipes in C - The Art of Scientific Computing - ISBN - 0 - 521 - 43108 - 5, 1988 - 1992   
 
  • Nonconvex Minimization Calculations and the Conjugate Gradient Method, Powell, M.J.D., Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 1066, pp. 122-141, 1984. [Advanced review on conjugate gradient for nonconvex functions.] 
 
  • Optimization by Simulated Annealings, Randelman, R. E., and Grest, G.S., N-City Traveling Salesman Problem - , J.Stat. Phys. 45, 885-890, 1986.
 
  • Function Minimization by Conjugate Gradients, Fletcher, R. and Reeves, C.M., Comp, J. 7, 149-154, 1964. [Advanced article on using conjugate gradient for nonconvex functions.] 

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

Getting the Most out of this Guide

To get the most of this guide, we suggest that you start performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the Basic and Advanced Tasks sections.

The Workbench Description section, which describes the Product Engineering Optimizer workbench, and the Customizing section, which explains how to set up the options, will also certainly prove useful.

Accessing sample documents

To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in either the online/kwoug_C2/samples folder.
For more information about this, please refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.

Conventions Used in this Guide

To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, refer to the Conventions section.