Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization
OpenMDAO is an open-source Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) framework, written in Python. It helps users solve complex problems by allowing them to link together analysis codes from multiple disciplines at multiple levels of fidelity. Sometimes MDAO is also used as an acronym for MultiDisciplinary Analysis and Optimization.
Here are a few other acronyms that you might come across:
- MDO: MultiDisciplinary Optimization
- MDA: MultiDisciplinary Analysis
Solvers and Optimizers
Out of the box, OpenMDAO provides a number of solvers and optimizers that users can leverage to build new analyses and optimization methods quickly and efficiently. It also provides support for executing Design Of Experiments (DOE) and Surrogate Modeling.
NASA designed
The development effort is being led out of the NASA Glenn Research Center, with support from the NASA Langley Research Center. The effort is funded by the Subsonic Fixed Wing Project, under the Fundamental Aeronautics Program. The goal is to provide the next-generation MDAO framework to better support the analysis of unconventional aircraft concepts. Although the focus is on analyzing aerospace applications, the framework itself is extremely general and is not specific to any discipline.
Why open source?
One of the goals of OpenMDAO is to provide a common platform for researchers and engineers to perform analyses and optimizations. A common platform allows for greater collaboration and makes it so that new research more easily extends the older research. It can also provide a foundation for new analyses to be rapidly integrated into existing tool suites. We firmly believe that open-source development best facilitates this goal and provides the broadest possible impact to the scientific and research communities.
In short, The OpenMDAO development teams views open-source licensing as a fundamental feature of our framework. OpenMDAO just does not make much sense without it!
