Journées de l'optimisation 2007 Optimizations days

In this talk, I will try to give the flavour of the process of applying optimization for the first time to a class of problems. In this case, the problem requires collaboration between a group of tsunami experts and a group of optimizers. In such collaborations, it is typical that neither group knows much about the other's capabilities and concerns at the start. The main objective of the collaboration is to help formulate realistic goals for the project and then to achieve those goals. From the optimizer group point of view, the first step entails learning a bit of the client's terminology, and finding out what can be computed by the client group that might feed an optimization package. A major milestone is to formulate a reasonable test problem to see how difficult the optimization problem will be. The tsunami problem is of fairly low dimension, but nasty. It is at least nondifferentiable, if not discontinuous. Another milestone is to successfully run optimization on the test problem and then interpret the results, and reformulate the test problem. Our optimization group is experienced in working on real-world applications. These types of applications motivated the development of our NOMAD optimization package. The project is now at a point that we can tackle the real buoy location problem, and it has led us to plan to direct our research towards modifications of NOMAD that will make it more efficient for the increasingly important class of sensor location problems.