Abstract
Design sensitivity analysis of large scale multibody systems is a computationally intensive process, which is well suited for implementation on a parallel computer. This paper presents a parallel processing oriented generalized design sensitivity analysis method for multibody dynamic systems. A direct differentiation method, which is more efficient than an adjoint variable method in a parallel processing environment due to the inherent parallelism, is applied to a recursive formulation for multibody dynamics to set up dynamic sensitivity equations. A high level of parallelism is achieved, exploiting the independence of each set of design sensitivity equations. To verify the formulation for design sensitivity analysis and to demonstrate the speedup on a parallel computer, an example is presented.
