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.

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

This book addresses modern nonlinear programming (NLP) concepts and algorithms, especially as they apply to challenging applications in chemical process engineering. The author provides a firm grounding in fundamental NLP properties and algorithms, and relates them to real-world problem classes in process optimization, thus making the material understandable and useful to chemical engineers and experts in mathematical optimization. Nonlinear Programming shows readers which NLP methods are best suited for specific applications, how large-scale problems should be formulated and what features of these problems should be emphasized, and how existing NLP methods can be extended to exploit specific structures of large-scale optimization models.

Many engineering and scientific problems in design, control, and parameter estimation can be formulated as optimization problems that are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The complexities of the PDEs - and the requirement for rapid solution - pose significant difficulties. A particularly challenging class of PDE-constrained optimization problems is characterized by the need for real-time solution, i.e., in time scales that are sufficiently rapid to support simulation-based decision making. Real-Time PDE-Constrained Optimization, the first book devoted to real-time optimization for systems governed by PDEs, focuses on new formulations, methods, and algorithms needed to facilitate real-time, PDE-constrained optimization. In addition to presenting state-of-the-art algorithms and formulations, the text illustrates these algorithms with a diverse set of applications that includes problems in the areas of aerodynamics, biology, fluid dynamics, medicine, chemical processes, homeland security, and structural dynamics. Despite difficulties, there is a pressing need to capitalize on continuing advances in computing power to develop optimization methods that will replace simple rule-based decision making with optimized decisions based on complex PDE simulations.