16,175 research outputs found
A Global Optimisation Toolbox for Massively Parallel Engineering Optimisation
A software platform for global optimisation, called PaGMO, has been developed
within the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) at the European Space Agency, and was
recently released as an open-source project. PaGMO is built to tackle
high-dimensional global optimisation problems, and it has been successfully
used to find solutions to real-life engineering problems among which the
preliminary design of interplanetary spacecraft trajectories - both chemical
(including multiple flybys and deep-space maneuvers) and low-thrust (limited,
at the moment, to single phase trajectories), the inverse design of
nano-structured radiators and the design of non-reactive controllers for
planetary rovers. Featuring an arsenal of global and local optimisation
algorithms (including genetic algorithms, differential evolution, simulated
annealing, particle swarm optimisation, compass search, improved harmony
search, and various interfaces to libraries for local optimisation such as
SNOPT, IPOPT, GSL and NLopt), PaGMO is at its core a C++ library which employs
an object-oriented architecture providing a clean and easily-extensible
optimisation framework. Adoption of multi-threaded programming ensures the
efficient exploitation of modern multi-core architectures and allows for a
straightforward implementation of the island model paradigm, in which multiple
populations of candidate solutions asynchronously exchange information in order
to speed-up and improve the optimisation process. In addition to the C++
interface, PaGMO's capabilities are exposed to the high-level language Python,
so that it is possible to easily use PaGMO in an interactive session and take
advantage of the numerous scientific Python libraries available.Comment: To be presented at 'ICATT 2010: International Conference on
Astrodynamics Tools and Techniques
Fast Non-Parametric Learning to Accelerate Mixed-Integer Programming for Online Hybrid Model Predictive Control
Today's fast linear algebra and numerical optimization tools have pushed the
frontier of model predictive control (MPC) forward, to the efficient control of
highly nonlinear and hybrid systems. The field of hybrid MPC has demonstrated
that exact optimal control law can be computed, e.g., by mixed-integer
programming (MIP) under piecewise-affine (PWA) system models. Despite the
elegant theory, online solving hybrid MPC is still out of reach for many
applications. We aim to speed up MIP by combining geometric insights from
hybrid MPC, a simple-yet-effective learning algorithm, and MIP warm start
techniques. Following a line of work in approximate explicit MPC, the proposed
learning-control algorithm, LNMS, gains computational advantage over MIP at
little cost and is straightforward for practitioners to implement
- …