Simulated annealing with crystallization heuristic applied to aircraft conceptual design

Simulation-based optimization is an area where techniques from optimization and simulation analysis are integrated. This work uses a simulation based optimization technique to determine the best aircraft conceptual design according to the constraints imposed by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Design competition. The optimization was performed by the Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm. The SA has two main parameters to be configured: the cooling schedule and the next candidate determination. This work researches three different strategies to implement the crystallization heuristic, that is used to determine the next candidate. According to the obtained results it is possible to observe that design parameters with different sensibilities can be self-tuned without the necessity of manual configurations.