Solving Computationally Expensive Engineering Problems

Computational complexity is a serious bottleneck for the design process in virtually any engineering area. While migration from prototyping and experimental-based design validation to verification using computer simulation models is inevitable and has a number of advantages, high computational costs of accurate, high-fidelity simulations can be a major issue that slows down the development of computer-aided design methodologies, particularly those exploiting automated design improvement procedures, e.g., numerical optimization. The continuous increase of available computational resources does not always translate into shortening of the design cycle because of the growing demand for higher accuracy and necessity to simulate larger and more complex systems. Accurate simulation of a single design of a given system may be as long as several hours, days or even weeks, which often makes design automation using conventional methods impractical or even prohibitive. Additional problems include numerical noise often present in the simulation data, possible presence of multiple locally optimum designs, as well as multiple conflicting objectives. In this edited book, various techniques that can alleviate solving computationally expensive engineering design problems are presented. One of the most promising approaches is the use of fast replacement models, so-called surrogates, that reliably represent the expensive, simulation-based model of the system/device of interest but they are much cheaper and analytically tractable. Here, a group of international experts summarize recent developments in the area and demonstrate applications in various disciplines of engineering and science. The main purpose of the work is to provide the basic concepts and formulations of the surrogate-based modeling and optimization paradigm, as well as discuss relevant modeling techniques, optimization algorithms and design procedures. Therefore, this book should be useful to researchers and engineers from any discipline where computationally heavy simulations are used on daily basis in the design process.

This timely review book summarizes the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired optimization algorithms and their applications in engineering. Algorithms and topics include the overview and history of nature-inspired algorithms, discrete firefly algorithm, discrete cuckoo search, plant propagation algorithm, parameter-free bat algorithm, gravitational search, biogeography-based algorithm, differential evolution, particle swarm optimization and others. Applications include vehicle routing, swarming robots, discrete and combinatorial optimization, clustering of wireless sensor networks, cell formation, economic load dispatch, metamodeling, surrogated-assisted cooperative co-evolution, data fitting and reverse engineering as well as other case studies in engineering. This book will be an ideal reference for researchers, lecturers, graduates and engineers who are interested in nature-inspired computation, artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. It can also serve as a reference for relevant courses in computer science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, natural computation, engineering optimization and data mining.

Contemporary engineering design is heavily based on computer simulations. Accurate, high-fidelity simulations are used not only for design verification but, even more importantly, to adjust parameters of the system to have it meet given performance requirements. Unfortunately, accurate simulations are often computationally very expensive with evaluation times as long as hours or even days per design, making design automation using conventional methods impractical. These and other problems can be alleviated by the development and employment of so-called surrogates that reliably represent the expensive, simulation-based model of the system or device of interest but they are much more reasonable and analytically tractable. This volume features surrogate-based modeling and optimization techniques, and their applications for solving difficult and computationally expensive engineering design problems. It begins by presenting the basic concepts and formulations of the surrogate-based modeling and optimization paradigm and then discusses relevant modeling techniques, optimization algorithms and design procedures, as well as state-of-the-art developments. The chapters are self-contained with basic concepts and formulations along with applications and examples. The book will be useful to researchers in engineering and mathematics, in particular those who employ computationally heavy simulations in their design work.

Scientific Computing with MATLAB®, Second Edition improves students’ ability to tackle mathematical problems. It helps students understand the mathematical background and find reliable and accurate solutions to mathematical problems with the use of MATLAB, avoiding the tedious and complex technical details of mathematics. This edition retains the structure of its predecessor while expanding and updating the content of each chapter. The book bridges the gap between problems and solutions through well-grouped topics and clear MATLAB example scripts and reproducible MATLAB-generated plots. Students can effortlessly experiment with the scripts for a deep, hands-on exploration. Each chapter also includes a set of problems to strengthen understanding of the material.