This paper represents how typical advanced engineering design can be structured using a set of parameters and objective functions corresponding to the nature of the problem. The set of parameters can be in different types, including integer, real, cyclic, combinatorial, interval, etc. Similarly, the objective function can be presented in various types including integer (discrete), float, and interval. The simulated annealing with crystallization heuristic can deal with all these combinations of parameters and objective functions when the crystallization heuristic presents a sensibility for real parameters. Herein, simulated annealing with the crystallization heuristic is enhanced by combining Bates and Gaussian distributions and by incorporating feedback strategies to emphasize exploration or refinement, or a combination of the two. The problems that are studied include solving an electrical impedance tomography problem with float parameters and a partially evaluated objective function represented by an interval requiring the solution of 32 sparse linear systems defined by the finite element method, as well as an airplane design problem with several parameters and constraints used to reduce the explored domain. The combination of the proposed feedback strategies and simulated annealing with the crystallization heuristic is compared with existing simulated annealing algorithms and their benchmark results are shown. The enhanced simulated annealing approach proposed herein showed better results for the majority of the studied cases.
This chapter is related to several aspects of optimization problems in engineering. Engineers usually mathematically model a problem and create a function that must be minimized, like cost, required time, wasted material, etc. Eventually, the function must be maximized. This function has different names in the literature: objective function, cost function, etc. We will refer to it in the chapter as objective function. There is a wide range of possibilities for the problems and they can be classified in different ways. At first, the values of the parameters can be continuous, discrete (integers), cyclic (angles), intervals, and combinatorial. The result of the objective function can be continuous, discrete (integers) or intervals. One very difficult class of problems have continuous parameters and discrete objective function, this type of objective function has very weak sensibility. This chapter shows the versatility of the simulated annealing showing that it can have different possibilities of parameters and objective functions.
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