| Recent advances in computer hardware and software techniques offer opportunities to create large-scale engineering design systems that were once thought to be impossible or impractical. Incorporating existing software systems into an integrated engineering design system and creating new capabilities in the integrated system are challenging problems in the area of engineering software design. The creation of such a system is a large and complex project. Furthermore the engineering design system usually needs to be modified and extended quite often because of continuing developments in engineering theories and practice.; Confronted with such a massive, complex, and volatile project, the program developers have been attempting to devise systematic approaches to complete the software system and maintain its understandability, modifiability, reliability, and efficiency (Ross, Goodenough, and Irvine, 1975). Considerable efforts have been made toward achieving these goals. They include the discipline of software engineering, the database management techniques, and the software design methodologies.; Among the software design methods, the object-oriented approach has been very successful in the past years. This can be reflected from the supports of the object-oriented programming paradigm in the popular programming languages such as Ada (1983) and C++ (Stroustrup, 1986). Yet, no large engineering application software system has been developed with the object-oriented approach up to the present time. This is probably due to systems are integrated into IDESIGN-10 to create a basic optimization capability. A new RQP algorithm based on augmented Lagrangian is implemented into the system in a relatively short time. These capabilities demonstrate the extendibility of IDESIGN-10. The process of developing the new RQP algorithm is presented in depth as a complete demonstration of object-oriented programming in engineering applications. A preliminary evaluation of the algorithm shows that it has potential for engineering applications; however it needs to be further developed. |
