OpenMDAO Development History
2015
OpenMDAO V1 initial release
The V1 docs system was rebuilt along with the framework code. We made a new logo too!
We provided a conversion guide for upgrading from V0 to V1. It required extensive changes to user code. Most user waited over 1 year to make the update.


Final release of OpenMDAO V0
Despite working on a total V1 rewrite starting in 2014, we continued a few minor development tasks on version 0 t0 support existing users and fix minor bugs through early 2015.
2014
5x faster design of a wind-turbine in OpenMDAO V0 with analytic derivatives
This paper showed that wind turbine design with with OpenMDAO V0 analytic derivative approach offered significant compute time savings, despite the algorithm being non-scalable.
Most of the algorithms in this paper ultimately got discarded in the V1 rewrite.
2013
UofM MDO Lab published new approach to MDO framework with derivatives
This paper provided the fundamental methods that showed OpenMDAO V0 was a dead end.
The dense-matrix approach OpenMDAO had taken would not scale up to high-fidelity problems.
2012
First OpenMDAO papers to use derivatives
2012 AIAA MDO conference:
- “A Standard Platform for Testing and Comparison of MDAO Architectures”
- “Calculation of Sensitivity Derivatives in an MDAO Framework”
Papers failed to attract any outside users!
2010
Initial OpenMDAO Release
The first docs are still online!
2007