The Motivation, Development and Applications of a Commercial Optimization Software Package Using DOE/RSM and NLP Methods

This paper presents the motivation development and an application of a unique methodology to solve Industrial Optimization problems, using existing simulation software programs. In order to make this a reality, (1) a unique way of communicating with simulation programs, (2) parallel execution of multiple Designs dictated by an extensive library of Design of Experiment plans - sampling the Design Space with the minimum amount of function evaluations while capturing the Design behavior - (3) a Stochastic Interpolation Response Surface Modeling technique and (4) Non-Linear Programming techniques are the essential elements of this methodology. Finally an application from the automotive industry demonstrate the methodology.