ESDC
ESDC (Evolutionary System Design Converger) is a software suite designed for optimization of complex engineering systems. ESDC uses system modelling equations, a database containing data points of existing systems, system scaling equations as well as mission requirements to design systems that fulfill their design objectives in the most efficient and effective way.
GSoC 2019 Contribution
The heart of ESDC’s optimization process is a genetic algorithm. The algorithm takes an initial population of design points and navigates the design space using a series of operations that are inspired from natural selection, such as mutation of permitted design degrees of freedom and subsequent selection, . One optimization cycle produces a lot of data and need to be analyzed and examined in order to acquire insight about the optimal designs, the performance of the algorithm and the design space in general.
My contribution to the project is a flexible multi-dimensional visualization and animation system designed for exploration of the system’s evolution data. The system uses various visual aspects of the generated visualizations in order to encode more degrees-of-freedom that would normally be possible in a simple 2-d or 3-d plot, thus allowing the exploration of complex systems. The definition of the visualizations is achieved through a user-defined XML file, where a plethora of options for customizing the content, the features and the annotation of the visualizations is available. The visualization system also has the ability to animate the generated figures, thus visually recreating the progress of the optimization.
Repository
ESDC’s repository can be found here: https://github.com/aerospaceresearch/ESDC
The codebase of the visualization system, which was completely developed during this GSoC project can be found here: https://github.com/aerospaceresearch/ESDC/tree/master/Code/Output/Visualization
The documentation of the visualization system, which was also completely developed during this GSoC project, can also be found here: https://github.com/aerospaceresearch/ESDC/tree/master/Documentation/Visualization
Alternatively, the corresponding commits can be found here: https://github.com/aerospaceresearch/ESDC/commits?author=s-themis
Blog Posts
The progress of the project during each coding period was documented in three separate blog posts. You can find the blog posts in the following links.
Blog Post 1: https://aerospaceresearch.net/?p=1542
Blog Post 2: https://aerospaceresearch.net/?p=1571
Blog Post 3: https://aerospaceresearch.net/?p=1785
Future Work
Although the planned key features have all been implemented, there is always room for improvement and as the ESDC project is growing additional needs will arise. Currently, the main future work identified is:
-) Improved integration with ESDC, specifically automatically acquiring names and units of the system’s degrees-of-freedom which can be used in all annotations.
-) Automatic generation of additional data from data to understand reasoning behind the final design. For example, presenting the relevant data, where designed subsystems rely on.