Extracting Design Information From Optimized Designs of Power Flow Systems: Application to Multisplit Thermal Management System Configuration

Abstract As engineering systems grow more intricate and technological progress accelerates, traditional sources of design knowledge, such as historical data and expert intuition, struggle to keep pace with the complexity and the speed of knowledge generation. To address this challenge, additional sources of knowledge are necessary, particularly for designing unprecedented engineering systems lacking any design heritage. One promising approach involves analyzing optimized designs to extract valuable insights, enabling designers to break away from incremental improvements over existing designs. This article explores the extraction of design information from optimized designs in power flow systems using various classification machine learning methods, empowering designers to make informed decisions in future design endeavors. This design information can also serve as a foundation for synthesizing engineering system configurations that are more complex than those previously encountered. This approach offers several advantages over traditional methods, including its applicability in the absence of design heritage and its ability to provide normative guidance for system design. This article focuses on power flow systems that can be modeled as graphs with a tree structure, with the case study being multisplit fluid-based thermal management systems. The article presents four case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of using information from optimized designs to enhance the design of complex thermal management systems, in both human-directed and automated design processes. The results show that information extraction significantly improves the design process, with less than 1 percent error in approximating the true optimal configuration. This approach eliminates the need for solving complex control problems, leading to reduced computation costs.