OPTEC - Optimization in Engineering Center

The mission of the Optimization in Engineering Center (OPTEC) is to make internationally recognized progress on optimization techniques for a broad range of engineering applications. The present industrial and economic situation is characterized by a globalization combined with a crisis of the economies, ever stronger climate and environmental constraints, and increased competition. This calls for better performance of the industrial products, more efficiency and higher productivity of production processes, posing real challenges for engineering research, design and development. It is then a common engineering approach to translate the engineering problem into a mathematical optimization problem where an objective function needs to be minimized with respect to give n constraints. Once this conversion has been performed, off-the-shelf softwareroutines can be used to try to find the optimized design of the product or the optimal settings of the production process. It is not the aim of OPTEC to interfere or change this procedure, when it is successful. However, there are many reasons why this straightforward approach often breaks down or is insufficient. First of all, the optimization problem may be multi-modal, with many local minima, where the global minimum is difficult to find. Second, the conversion of the engineering problem into an optimization problem may be inadequate, so that the optimized solution is not valuable. Third, often implicit or hidden constraints can make a mathematically correct solution useless in practice. Fourth, the optimization problem may be too complex to be handled by the available software. In other words, there exists a gap between the optimization world and the engineering world. It is theambition of OPTEC to bridge this gap with several generic methods for well targeted but relevant applications. This approach is quite original and complementary, and also in good concertation with the external research groups that w ork on generic optimization theory.

Keywords:procestechnologie, simulatie, optimisering

Disciplines:Ceramic and glass materials, Materials science and engineering, Semiconductor materials, Other materials engineering