In our previous works, the diesel particulate filter (DPF) using a new composite regeneration mode by coupling microwave and ceria-manganese base catalysts is verified as an effective way to reduce the particulate matter emission of the diesel engine. In order to improve the overall performance of this DPF, its multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) model is established based on objective functions such as pressure drop, regeneration performance, microwave energy consumption, and thermal shock resistance. Then, the DPF is optimized by using MDO method based on adaptive mutative scale chaos optimization algorithm. The optimization results show that with the help of MDO, DPF's pressure drop is decreased by 14.5%, regeneration efficiency is increased by 17.3%, microwave energy consumption is decreased by 17.6%, and thermal deformation is decreased by 25.3%. The optimization results are also verified by experiments, and the experimental results indicate that the optimized DPF has larger filtration efficiency, better emission performance and regeneration performance, smaller pressure drop, lower wall temperature and temperature gradient, and lower microwave energy consumption. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.