Abstract

Necessity to address engineering system uncertainties in design processes has long been acknowledged. To obtain quality of product, a safety factor is traditionally used by many design engineers due to its easy of use and comprehension. However, the safety factor approach often yields either conservative or unreliable designs, since it ignores the type of probability distribution and the mechanism of uncertainty propagation from the input to the output. For a consistent reliability-based design, two fundamental issues must be investigated thoroughly. First, the designdecision process that clearly identifies a mechanism of uncertainty propagation under system uncertainties needs to be developed, which must be an efficient and accurate process. To identify the mechanism more effectively, an adaptive probability analysis is proposed by adaptively setting probability levels through a posteriori error estimation. The second is to develop the design process that not only yields a high quality design but also a cost-effective optimum design from manufacturing point of view. As a result, a response surface methodology is specially developed for RBDO, thus enhancing numerical challenges of efficiency and complicatedness. Side crashworthiness application is used to demonstrate the integrated design process for product and manufacturing process design.