Rationale
Several years ago, and in recognition of the growing
importance of "Design Optimization" to industrial CFD/CSM
applications, ERCOFTAC has established a Special Interest
Group, called SIG34. SIG34 now offers a course on "Design
Optimization" providing an information platform to
supporting and fostering a comprehensive exchange between
science and industry.
Nowadays, computational optimization is both an emerging and
wide-used technology in a variety of industrial sectors.
Motivated by the maturity of the design-optimization methods
and software as well as the advent of powerful modern
computational platforms, new automated design optimization
methods have already been applied to numerous problems, e.g.
in Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM), Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Electro-magnetics, Propulsion, Energy
Management and many others. Moreover, combinations of these
areas as so-called multi-disciplinary approaches (e.g.
fluid-structure interaction, fluid-electro-magnetics
interaction) are in use for achieving improvements in
"real-world" industrial designs.

Since "traditional" optimization methods often require a
significant number of solution points in the design space in
order to reach an improved (or optimal) design, substantial
effort has been devoted to device efficient search
strategies. Moreover, they have already been adapted to
multi-objective and multi-disciplinary problems in order to
cope with real-world engineering applications.


Aims
The course will provide:
o An overview of modern design optimization methods
o Comprehensive discussions on the presented methods
including their pros and cons, assisting industrial
engineers to select the best-suited approach for solving
their particular problems.
o Based on the latter topic, successfully treated examples
in the areas of aeronautics, the automotive, and the
turbo-machinery industry will be presented and thoroughly