A Review of Recent Developments in Electrical Machine Design Optimization Methods With a Permanent-Magnet Synchronous Motor Benchmark Study

This paper systematically covers the significant developments of the last decade, including surrogate modeling of electrical machines and direct and stochastic search algorithms for both single- and multi-objective design optimization problems. The specific challenges and the dedicated algorithms for electric machine design are discussed, followed by benchmark studies comparing response surface (RS) and differential evolution (DE) algorithms on a permanent-magnet-synchronous-motor design with five independent variables and a strong nonlinear multiobjective Pareto front and on a function with eleven independent variables. The results show that RS and DE are comparable when the optimization employs only a small number of candidate designs and DE performs better when more candidates are considered.