Special issue on commercial design optimization software: an introductory note

Abstract

Twenty years later I have come to understand the true meaning of Jim Siddall’s comment. Having worked with several colleagues in industry across the world and having followed their work quite closely I came to a couple of conclusions: The complexity of the optimal design problems that our industry colleagues address successfully far exceeds what many of us academics suspect or even dare undertake. Furthermore, the true heroes of the indisputable growth of design optimization use in industry (or the academy for that matter) are the “commercial” software vendors–the companies and the people who have tried to put together software packages that are robust, friendly and accessible to users that may lack the sophistication or the time to use the immediate products of the academic endeavor. To be fair, these commercial software entities would not have been possible without the intellectual fruits of the academic research. The point however is not to minimize the latter’s importance; rather, it is to recognize that we should applaud all such “commercial” efforts, filter the hype of the marketplace, and support their collective use by students and colleagues in academia and industry alike. For example, thanks to the Excel Solver I have been able to do the unimaginable (to me anyway): have second-year college sophomores use design optimization intelligently in their project work.