In many areas of application, it is desirable to design structures that have the highest possible strength and stiffness at the lowest possible weight. Methods of shape or topology optimization are therefore increasingly used. Deterministic design optimization of structures tends to provide designs which are sensitive to deviations from the ideal configuration, for which they are designed. Particularly in safety-critical applications such as aircraft components, it is important to design structures in such a way that they offer sufficient strength and stiffness not only under ideal conditions. Robust design optimization approaches allow for taking into account the influences of randomly scattering material properties, geometry and loads. The current talk provides an overview of robust and reliability-based design optimization approaches. High dimensional optimization approaches as shape and topology optimization require efficient approaches to quantify stochastic moments and their gradients. The talk will provide details on how this can be achieved with probabilistic approaches. The talk will also show how worst-case scenarios can be incorporated in the optimization of structures.
