24,245 research outputs found
Simultaneous Optimal Uncertainty Apportionment and Robust Design Optimization of Systems Governed by Ordinary Differential Equations
The inclusion of uncertainty in design is of paramount practical importance because all real-life systems are affected by it. Designs that ignore uncertainty often lead to poor robustness, suboptimal performance, and higher build costs. Treatment of small geometric uncertainty in the context of manufacturing tolerances is a well studied topic. Traditional sequential design methodologies have recently been replaced by concurrent optimal design methodologies where optimal system parameters are simultaneously determined along with optimally allocated tolerances; this allows to reduce manufacturing costs while increasing performance. However, the state of the art approaches remain limited in that they can only treat geometric related uncertainties restricted to be small in magnitude.
This work proposes a novel framework to perform robust design optimization concurrently with optimal uncertainty apportionment for dynamical systems governed by ordinary differential equations. The proposed framework considerably expands the capabilities of contemporary methods by enabling the treatment of both geometric and non-geometric uncertainties in a unified manner. Additionally, uncertainties are allowed to be large in magnitude and the governing constitutive relations may be highly nonlinear.
In the proposed framework, uncertainties are modeled using Generalized Polynomial Chaos and are solved quantitatively using a least-square collocation method. The computational efficiency of this approach allows statistical moments of the uncertain system to be explicitly included in the optimization-based design process. The framework formulates design problems as constrained multi-objective optimization problems, thus enabling the characterization of a Pareto optimal trade-off curve that is off-set from the traditional deterministic optimal trade-off curve. The Pareto off-set is shown to be a result of the additional statistical moment information formulated in the objective and constraint relations that account for the system uncertainties. Therefore, the Pareto trade-off curve from the new framework characterizes the entire family of systems within the probability space; consequently, designers are able to produce robust and optimally performing systems at an optimal manufacturing cost.
A kinematic tolerance analysis case-study is presented first to illustrate how the proposed methodology can be applied to treat geometric tolerances. A nonlinear vehicle suspension design problem, subject to parametric uncertainty, illustrates the capability of the new framework to produce an optimal design at an optimal manufacturing cost, accounting for the entire family of systems within the associated probability space. This case-study highlights the general nature of the new framework which is capable of optimally allocating uncertainties of multiple types and with large magnitudes in a single calculation
Common pulse retrieval algorithm: a fast and universal method to retrieve ultrashort pulses
We present a common pulse retrieval algorithm (COPRA) that can be used for a
broad category of ultrashort laser pulse measurement schemes including
frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), interferometric FROG, dispersion
scan, time domain ptychography, and pulse shaper assisted techniques such as
multiphoton intrapulse interference phase scan (MIIPS). We demonstrate its
properties in comprehensive numerical tests and show that it is fast, reliable
and accurate in the presence of Gaussian noise. For FROG it outperforms
retrieval algorithms based on generalized projections and ptychography.
Furthermore, we discuss the pulse retrieval problem as a nonlinear
least-squares problem and demonstrate the importance of obtaining a
least-squares solution for noisy data. These results improve and extend the
possibilities of numerical pulse retrieval. COPRA is faster and provides more
accurate results in comparison to existing retrieval algorithms. Furthermore,
it enables full pulse retrieval from measurements for which no retrieval
algorithm was known before, e.g., MIIPS measurements
Distributed Constrained Recursive Nonlinear Least-Squares Estimation: Algorithms and Asymptotics
This paper focuses on the problem of recursive nonlinear least squares
parameter estimation in multi-agent networks, in which the individual agents
observe sequentially over time an independent and identically distributed
(i.i.d.) time-series consisting of a nonlinear function of the true but unknown
parameter corrupted by noise. A distributed recursive estimator of the
\emph{consensus} + \emph{innovations} type, namely , is
proposed, in which the agents update their parameter estimates at each
observation sampling epoch in a collaborative way by simultaneously processing
the latest locally sensed information~(\emph{innovations}) and the parameter
estimates from other agents~(\emph{consensus}) in the local neighborhood
conforming to a pre-specified inter-agent communication topology. Under rather
weak conditions on the connectivity of the inter-agent communication and a
\emph{global observability} criterion, it is shown that at every network agent,
the proposed algorithm leads to consistent parameter estimates. Furthermore,
under standard smoothness assumptions on the local observation functions, the
distributed estimator is shown to yield order-optimal convergence rates, i.e.,
as far as the order of pathwise convergence is concerned, the local parameter
estimates at each agent are as good as the optimal centralized nonlinear least
squares estimator which would require access to all the observations across all
the agents at all times. In order to benchmark the performance of the proposed
distributed estimator with that of the centralized nonlinear
least squares estimator, the asymptotic normality of the estimate sequence is
established and the asymptotic covariance of the distributed estimator is
evaluated. Finally, simulation results are presented which illustrate and
verify the analytical findings.Comment: 28 pages. Initial Submission: Feb. 2016, Revised: July 2016,
Accepted: September 2016, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal and
Information Processing over Networks: Special Issue on Inference and Learning
over Network
Decomposition by Partial Linearization: Parallel Optimization of Multi-Agent Systems
We propose a novel decomposition framework for the distributed optimization
of general nonconvex sum-utility functions arising naturally in the system
design of wireless multiuser interfering systems. Our main contributions are:
i) the development of the first class of (inexact) Jacobi best-response
algorithms with provable convergence, where all the users simultaneously and
iteratively solve a suitably convexified version of the original sum-utility
optimization problem; ii) the derivation of a general dynamic pricing mechanism
that provides a unified view of existing pricing schemes that are based,
instead, on heuristics; and iii) a framework that can be easily particularized
to well-known applications, giving rise to very efficient practical (Jacobi or
Gauss-Seidel) algorithms that outperform existing adhoc methods proposed for
very specific problems. Interestingly, our framework contains as special cases
well-known gradient algorithms for nonconvex sum-utility problems, and many
blockcoordinate descent schemes for convex functions.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
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