Events Calendar

Engineering Design in the Presence of Errors

Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Abstract"Engineering Design in the Presence of Errors"Dr Omid NohadaniOperations Research, MIT and Harvard Medical School In principle, complex systems can be optimized to improve their performance with respect to their desired functionalities. There is numerous evidence showing that if possible errors are not taken into account during the design process, we might lose the actual phenomenon. With this in mind, the field of robust optimization started within the mathematical programming community. Most results, however, were confined to problems with convex objectives. But modern engineering problems have objectives and constraints that are not explicitly given, e.g. numerical simulations describing the problem. In this talk, I will describe the recent advancements in this field which allowed to bridge the gap and provided methods for generic robust design. I will discuss examples in ultrafast optics using chirped mirrors and in cancer treatments with intensity modulated radiation therapy. Surprisingly, the robust solutions in question come at a fairly low price indicating that the advantages are worth the negligible sub-optimality. Because of their generality, the presented methods can be applied to a wide range of engineering design problems. Monday, October 15, 2007, 4:15 PM, SLH 102Refreshments served at 3:45 PM

Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum