With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

Inverse problems and optimal design have come of age as a consequence of the availability of better, more accurate, and more efficient simulation packages. Many of these simulators, which can run on small workstations, can capture the complicated behavior of the physical systems they are modeling, and have become commonplace tools in engineering and science. There is a great desire to use them as part of a process by which measured field data are analyzed or by which design of a product is automated. A major obstacle in doing precisely this is that one is ultimately confronted with a large-scale optimization problem. This volume contains expository articles on both inverse problems and design problems formulated as optimization. Each paper describes the physical problem in some detail and is meant to be accessible to researchers in optimization as well as those who work in applied areas where optimization is a key tool. What emerges in the presentations is that there are features about the problem that must be taken into account in posing the objective function, and in choosing an optimization strategy. In particular there are certain structures peculiar to the problems that deserve special treatment, and there is ample opportunity for parallel computation. THIS IS BACK COVER TEXT Inverse problems and optimal design have come of age as a consequence of the availability of better, more accurate, and more efficient, simulation packages. The problem of determining the parameters of a physical system from

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

The absence of derivatives, often combined with the presence of noise or lack of smoothness, is a major challenge for optimization. This book explains how sampling and model techniques are used in derivative-free methods and how these methods are designed to efficiently and rigorously solve optimization problems. Although readily accessible to readers with a modest background in computational mathematics, it is also intended to be of interest to researchers in the field. Introduction to Derivative-Free Optimization is the first contemporary comprehensive treatment of optimization without derivatives. This book covers most of the relevant classes of algorithms from direct search to model-based approaches. It contains a comprehensive description of the sampling and modeling tools needed for derivative-free optimization; these tools allow the reader to better understand the convergent properties of the algorithms and identify their differences and similarities. Introduction to Derivative-Free Optimization also contains analysis of convergence for modified Nelder-Mead and implicit-filtering methods, as well as for model-based methods such as wedge methods and methods based on minimum-norm Frobenius models.