49928 Optimisation Methods and Applications in Engineering

Optimisation has become a necessary part of design and decision-making activities in all major disciplines, and is receiving serious attention from engineers, scientists and managers. This subject emphasizes applications of optimisation techniques in engineering design and project management activities. It introduces students to an array of optimisation techniques and enables students to learn to use these techniques in solving real engineering design and project management problems. Graphical and visualisation programs are developed to assist student learning and provide students with optimisation tools. On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to model optimal design and decision-making problems, and apply a portfolio of optimisation techniques and use optimisation tools/software to solve practical problems.

This subject should be of interest to students in broad engineering areas (e.g. mechanical and mechatronics, civil and structural, telecommunication, etc.). It should also be of interest to students from other faculties that use mathematical programming and optimisation techniques for design and management.

Assessment: Assignment (30 per cent); project (30 per cent); quiz (40 per cent).

Texts and references

Venkataraman, P, Applied optimization with Matlab Programming, John Wiley & Sons, 2002

Handouts are also prepared by the subject coordinator.

Rao, S S, Engineering optimization: theory and practice, New York: Wiley, 1996

Miller, R E, Optimization: foundations and applications, New York: Wiley, 2000

Papalambros, P Y & Wilde, D J, Principles of optimal design, Cambridge, 2000

Ansari, N & Hou, E, Computational intelligence for optimization, Kluwer, Boston, 1997

Arora, J S, Introduction to optimum design, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1989

Belegundu, A D & Chandrupatla, T R, Optimization concepts and applications in engineering, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1999

Jones, C V, Visualization and Optimization, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, Massachusetts, 1996

Statnikov, R B & Matusov, J B, Multicriteria optimization and engineering, Chapman and Hall, New York, 1995

Typical availability

Spring semester, City campus