Optimization in Practice with MATLAB® For Engineering Students and Professionals

Overview

Welcome to the fascinating world of optimization. Indeed, you will find optimization to be a powerful addition to your education or to your toolkit in the workplace. This brief initial chapter provides you with a clear perspective as to how the book will play a key role in your understanding of optimization. As discussed in the Preface, this book takes a squarely practical perspective. As such, your learning will involve practicing optimization using many problems. By the end of your study of this book, you should expect to be able to work with others to optimize practically any design or system and improve its performance. If the design you would like to optimize is in your technical area of expertise, you might be able to do all of the work yourself. If the design or system you would like to optimize involves modeling issues with which you are not familiar, you will simply need to collaborate with someone (or a team) who is able to provide you with the computational performance models. In this latter case, as it often is in practice, you will provide your knowledge of optimization, and someone else may model the system. In other words, one person might do the structural analysis, another might do the financial analysis, and you might use your knowledge of this book to optimize the combined system to make it competitive in the market place.

What Is Optimization? What Is Its Relation to Analysis and Design?

What is optimization? Optimization can be defined in different ways. Some define it as “the art of making things the best.” Interestingly, many people do not like that definition as it may not be reasonable, or even possible, to do something in the very best possible way. In practice, doing something as well as possible within practical constraints is very desirable. Designing a product and doing all we can to increase profit as much as is practically possible is also very desirable.