Applications of parallel global optimization to mechanics problems

Global optimization of complex engineering problems, with a high number of variables and local minima, requires sophisticated algorithms with global search capabilities and high computational efficiency. With the growing availability of parallel processing, it makes sense to address these requirements by increasing the parallelism in optimization strategies. This study proposes three methods of concurrent processing. The first method entails exploiting the structure of population-based global algorithms such as the stochastic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and the Genetic Algorithm (GA). As a demonstration of how such an algorithm may be adapted for concurrent processing we modify and apply the PSO to several mechanical optimization problems on a parallel processing machine. Desirable PSO algorithm features such as insensitivity to design variable scaling and modest sensitivity to algorithm parameters are demonstrated. A second approach to parallelism and improving algorithm efficiency is by utilizing multiple optimizations. With this method a budget of fitness evaluations is distributed among several independent sub-optimizations in place of a single extended optimization. Under certain conditions this strategy obtains a higher combined probability of converging to the global optimum than a single optimization which utilizes the full budget of fitness evaluations. The third and final method of parallelism addressed in this study is the use of quasiseparable decomposition, which is applied to decompose loosely coupled problems. This yields several sub-problems of lesser dimensionality which may be concurrently optimized with reduced effort.