Synthesis by Mathematical Programming (OTMEC)

Abstract

In the design environment in which we were working we have found that the synthesis problem rarely is expressed as a precision point problem,.but precision point techniques, intuition or a systematic analysis of the act of movement are often the only means to give a starting point for synthesizing the real mechanism by optimization techniques. A search of the optimization algorithms available and some practical experiments have shown direct search techniques as beeing very attractive. A program is beeing written which used MEDES to compute the new configuration of the mechanisms for every new set of values of its functional dimensions and a pattern search algorithm to drive the search in the parameter’s space.