Design Optimization

What do we do ?

The design optimization team is based in the Computational Engineering and Design Group (CEDG) of Southampton University. It consists of a small number of graduate students and post-doctoral workers led by Prof. A.J. Keane. We are applying modern optimization methods to a number of problem areas. We have interests in: We have applied these methods/are applying them to: Full references for papers describing this work and a number of related subjects may be found on the home page of Prof. A.J. Keane (http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ajk/welcome.html ). The animation below illustrates three different search methods applied to the two-dimensional version of the bump problem. The red trace is a hill climber based on local linearization followed by a simplex algorithm. The yellow trace is the classic Hooke and Jeeves search. The purple trace is for a GA with 100 member populations run for 10 generations and the white points show all 1000 members from this search.



A rather more sophisticated (and larger - 0.6 Mb) version of this animation, which also shows a simulated annealing run (best value from each point of a logarithmic schedule) can be found here. Our software has been built up into a sophisticated design exploration system called OPTIONS which allows the rapid comparison of various methods on new design tasks. It is fully described in the on-line manual(Postscript version - 3.0Mb) for which the index and contents pages are available separately.


Full references for papers describing this work and a number of related subjects may be found on the home page of Prof. A.J. Keane (http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ajk/welcome.html ).

This article may be found at http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ajk/opt/welcome.html


Correspondence to Andy.Keane@soton.ac.uk, or Prof. A.J. Keane, School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, U.K.,
Tel +44-2380-592944 FAX +44-2380-593230.