Abstract
Co-design, or integrated physical and control system design, has been demonstrated successfully for several engineering system design optimization applications, primarily in a deterministic manner. An opportunity exists to study non-deterministic co-design strategies, including incorporation of uncertainty-induced failures, into an integrated co-design framework. Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) is one such method that can be used to increase the likelihood of having a feasible design that satisfies all reliability constraints. While significant recent advancements have been made in co-design and RBDO separately, limited work has been done where reliability-based dynamic system design and control design optimization are considered jointly. In this paper, the co-design problem is integrated with the RBDO framework to yield a system-optimal design and the corresponding control trajectory, which satisfy all reliability constraints in the presence of parameter variations. Different problem formulations and RBDO algorithms are compared through numerical examples. The design of a horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) supported by a lattice tower (with parameter uncertainties) is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method.