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.
