The objective of the paper is to present the structural design support system (DeSS) rationale for the reliability based design optimization (RBDO) in the concept design phase. Basic steps are as follows:
• Interactive identification of the design problem (design variables, constraints, objectives) as well as design problem variates and their distribution parameters. Safety related design criteria are used as objectives and as constraints in the presented procedure;
• Calculation of the cross section ultimate longitudinal strength criteria based on the extended Smith’s method; based on the Report SSC-398;
• Selection of non-dominated designs (Pareto-optimal, NDD points) for the given deterministic design criteria;
• Calculation of reliability/deterministic safety measures. Novel FASTREL code, based on the Dimension Reduction Method (DRM) is used for the reliability calculations;
• Generation of insight into the Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) process with 5D graphic presentation of designs in design and attribute spaces in the interactive OCTOPUS Designer (Demak/DeView) IT modules.
Practical application of the developed concept design methodology and of the design environment to the structural design of the verifiable test example corresponding to SSC-398 report. DeSS was used in fast generation of optimal designs using MODM (MOSLP) and MADM (MOPSO) techniques. To speed up the RBDO design process deterministic and probabilistic formulations of design problem were run concurrently and supporting each other are presented using the safety related design attributes (deterministic and reliability based) for the NDD supported decision-making technique.