Niko Manopulo
Niko Manopulo did his master's thesis at BMW AG, München (advisor at BMW: Markus Ganser), under supervision of Prof. Bungartz. He graduated from CSE/BGCE in November, 2006, and is now PhD student at the Institute of Virtual Manufacturing at ETH Zürich.
Master's Thesis:
A generalized approach for objective function calculation using
finite element simulations in computer aided robustness and optimization
Optimization and Robustness Analysis are of increasing importance in the field of metal forming simulation. The evaluation of the simulation results in relation to the quality and producibility of the car body parts has, till now, been done only in a visual manner and through experts. It is, however, indispensable to define mathematical criteria that can be formulated in the form of objective functions and constraints in order to use general-purpose optimization and robustness analysis methodologies.
The functionality provided by the commercial optimization packages for the definition of such criteria does not provide the necessary flexibility that arises in the definition of metal forming problems. The aim of this work was therefore to define a generalized methodology for the definition of objective functions and constraints based on the FE simulation of metal forming processes. The software tool OFLib developed in the scope of this work, provides flexible and extendable means to create objective function and constraint systems even for complex problem settings.
