In laminated composite cylindrical shells, openings such as doors, windows, and access ports, serve as integral functional features. However, their incorporation introduces stress concentrations which can compromise structural performance. A critical design consideration for cylindrical shells is often their resistance to buckling; a challenge that becomes more pronounced in the presence of these cutouts [1, 2]. One practical strategy to mitigate the adverse structural effects of cutouts is to use automated fiber placement to steer pre-impregnated tows along curvilinear paths around these features. This enables variable stiffness cylindrical shells with tailored fiber orientations that redirect load paths away from the cutout, reducing stress concentrations and minimizing the reliance on additional reinforcements such as pad-ups [3]. This work presents a multi-objective optimization of variable-stiffness cylindrical shells with cutouts subjected to axial compression. The objectives are to maximize the nonlinear buckling load and minimize the stress concentration factor around the cutouts. To accurately evaluate the buckling load while minimizing computational costs linked to high-fidelity geometrically nonlinear analysis, surrogate modeling is employed to streamline the optimization process. The proposed approach utilizes a limited number of data points derived from the geometrically nonlinear analysis, providing fast and efficiently accessible analytical approximations of the objectives and constraints at new design points [4]. Numerical results for variable-stiffness cylindrical shells with two different cutout configurations will be presented. These results demonstrate how high-fidelity nonlinear buckling analyses, combined with surrogate modeling, can help mitigate some of the adverse structural effects introduced by cutouts in thin-walled structures. REFERENCES [1] Groh, R., & Wu, K. C., Nonlinear Buckling and Postbuckling Analysis of Tow-Steered Composite Cylinders with Cutouts. AIAA J, 2022, 60(9), 5533-5546. [2] Wu, K. C., et al., Structural Performance of Advanced Composite Tow-Steered Shells with Cutouts,” AIAA SciTech 2014 Forum and Exposition, National Harbor, MD, USA, 2014. [3] G Zucco, et al. Continuous tow steering around an elliptical cutout in a composite panel. AIAA J, 2021 59 (12), 5117-5129. [4] M Rouhi, et al., Multi-objective design optimization of variable stiffness composite cylinders, Compos. Part B: Eng., 2015, 69, 249–255.