3 credits
Fall 2025 Lecture Upper Division
This course will introduce technology graduate students and senior undergraduates to the basic concepts of optimization methods with particular emphasis on applications in product and process design. Unconstrained nonlinear problems will be presented and solved using steepest descent and conjugate directions. Constrained problems will be solved using exterior penalty functions. Permission of department required.
Learning Outcomes1Recognize optimization problems and cast them in standard form.
2Identify objective functions and constraints.
3Use commercial software to solve formal optimization problems.
4Correctly identify global and local optimum solutions.
5Use basic calculus concepts to calculate design sensitivities.
6Understand the geometric concept of design space and be able to plot design space for a constrained problem with two design variables.
Prerequisites
Restrictions
made by Purdue students.