Ray, kindly post this announcement to the CAST10 list. Thanks.
I’ll be presenting a full-day short course “Nonlinear Optimization: Techniques for Engineering” as a workshop at the
2017 American Control Conference, 8am-6pm,
Tuesday, May 23, at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, Seattle, WA.
Participants get a pdf version of my forthcoming book on optimization and
software to run various algorithms.
The course is aimed at grad students, engineers, or faculty
who wish to pick up
application skills. I am a long term AIChE member with 13-years in industry
prior to my academic career. So, I think those applying optimization will find
the course useful.
Following is the short course description.
Nonlinear
Optimization: Techniques for Engineering
R. Russell Rhinehart,
Emeritus, Chemical Engineering, Oklahoma State University
Optimization is a fundamental tool for
modeling, control, forecasting, design, safety, sustainability, etc. We
desire an efficient procedure to find the best solution with minimal
computational or experimental effort. This workshop is intended to
be a practical guide of best practices from conventional methods.
Examples will illustrate the choices and techniques. Supporting theory
will be addressed, but the take-away will be the ability to implement
optimization – to specify objective functions, include constraints, select an
appropriate optimizer, and specify initialization and convergence
criteria. The course will cover common gradient-based optimization
techniques (Newton, Levenberg-Marquardt), surrogate model (successive
quadratic), and direct-search techniques (Heuristic, Particle Swarm, and
Leapfrogging), representing the fundamentals of most approaches.
Illustrative examples and exercises will include dynamic modeling and
constrained control. Mostly, examples represent mechanical situations, so
that people from all engineering and computer science disciplines can
understand. Participants will receive a draft textbook (Wiley,
anticipated late 2017) and software in Excel VBA, which will provide exercises
and access to code. Some course material can be previewed on www.r3eda.com. Participants are
invited to bring a computer with Excel version 2010 or higher for in-class
exploration. The programs are written by the workshop presenter, and are
dimensioned to accommodate up to 20 decision variables. Participants are
free to use the software subsequently, or to migrate it to their preferred
language.
Best
regards,
Russ
R. Russell Rhinehart
Emeritus Professor
School of Chemical Engineering – 420 EN
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078-5021
Office: (405)744-5280