Optimization strategies for complex engineering applications

LDRD research activities have focused on increasing the robustness and efficiency of optimization studies for computationally complex engineering problems. Engineering applications can be characterized by extreme computational expense, lack of gradient information, discrete parameters, non-converging simulations, and nonsmooth, multimodal, and discontinuous response variations. Guided by these challenges, the LDRD research activities have developed application-specific techniques, fundamental optimization algorithms, multilevel hybrid and sequential approximate optimization strategies, parallel processing approaches, and automatic differentiation and adjoint augmentation methods. This report surveys these activities and summarizes the key findings and recommendations