The course will provide an overview of modern design optimization methods. Comprehensive discussion of the presented methods, including their pros and cons, will assist industrial engineers to select the best-suited approach for solving their particular problems.

Rationale
Several years ago, and in recognition of the growing importance of “Design Optimization” to industrial CFD/CSM applications, ERCOFTAC has established a Special Interest Group, called SIG34. SIG34 now offers a course on “Design Optimization” providing an information platform to supporting and fostering a comprehensive exchange between science and industry.

Nowadays, computational optimization is both an emerging and wide-used technology in a variety of industrial sectors. Motivated by the maturity of the design-optimization methods and software as well as the advent of powerful modern computational platforms, new automated design optimization methods have already been applied to numerous problems, e.g. in Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Electro-magnetics, Propulsion, Energy Management and many others. Moreover, combinations of these areas as so-called multi-disciplinary approaches (e.g. fluid-structure interaction, fluid-electro-magnetics interaction) are in use for achieving improvements in “real-world” industrial designs.

Since “traditional” optimization methods often require a significant number of solution points in the design space in order to reach an improved (or optimal) design, substantial effort has been devoted to device efficient search strategies. Moreover, they have already been adapted to multi-objective and multi-disciplinary problems in order to cope with real-world engineering applications.

Successfully treated examples in the areas of aeronautics, the automotive, and the turbo-machinery industry will be presented and thoroughly discussed.