A systematic approach to parameter optimization and its application to flight schedule simulation software

Journal of Heuristics - Industrial software often has many parameters that critically impact performance. Frequently, these are left in a sub-optimal configuration for a given application because...     

Digital Holography for Instantaneous Spray Diagnostics on a Plane

We present a measurement technique that is capable of simultaneously determining sizes and positions of multiple transparent droplets in a plane from scattered light features. The technique is largely independent of particle intensity and mutual obscuration. Reflected and refracted light from the droplets in a pulsed laser sheet is recorded holographically to yield the smallest possible probe volume and the largest possible number density. Larger droplets are best analyzed at the image plane; in this case, the droplets appear as two spots (glare points), whose separation is proportional to the droplet diameter. Smaller droplets are easier to analyze at an out‐of‐focus plane, where their images appear as fringe patterns whose spatial frequency is related to droplet size. Photographic techniques allow only one of these planes to be chosen and are therefore not suitable for multidisperse sprays. Optical holography allows to analyze arbitrary depths, but often suffers from low sensitivity and long analysis times. With digital holography, the spray images are captured digitally by a CCD camera and reconstructed numerically; as in optical holography, the particle reconstruction plane can be freely chosen a posteriori to optimize the measurement. We discuss the issues raised by the transition from holographic film to a CCD sensor as the recording medium, and demonstrate the capabilities of the digital technique.     

Variational Analysis of the Abscissa Mapping for Polynomials via the Gauss-Lucas Theorem

Consider the linear space ? ⁿ of polynomials of degree n or less over the complex field. The abscissa mapping on ? ⁿ is the mapping that takes a polynomial to the maximum real part of its roots. This mapping plays a key role in the study of stability properties for linear systems. Burke and Overton have shown that the abscissa mapping is everywhere subdifferentially regular in the sense of Clarke on the manifold ? ⁿ of polynomials of degree n. In addition, they provide a formula for the subdifferential. The result is surprising since the abscissa mapping is not Lipschitzian on ? ⁿ . A key supporting lemma uses a proof technique due to Levantovskii for determining the tangent cone to the set of stable polynomials. This proof is arduous and opaque. It is a major obstacle to extending the variational theory to other functions of the roots of polynomials. In this note, we provide an alternative proof based on the Gauss-Lucas Theorem. This new proof is both insightful and elementary.     

Descent methods for composite nondifferentiable optimization problems

We present a framework for the development of globally defined descent algorithms for the minimization of non-differentiable objective functionsF := h º f withh convex. Within our structure the global convergence properties of the Cauchy, Modified Newton, Gauss—Newton, and Variable-Metric methods are easily established along with that of several new approaches. Examples illustrating the calculational techniques are provided.