The word
parsimonious means thrifty, economical, frugal, and sometimes even stingy. It is an unusual word to use when describing optimization, but it is meaningful here in two ways.
First, the purpose of optimization is to minimize a function. The intent is not a meager reduction, but absolute minimization. This seems pretty stingy, but in a useful way.
Second, and of greater interest here, the process of optimization must be efficient, economical, and thrifty. That is, finding an optimized solution to a problem should take as little of your time and resources as possible. Unfortunately, in many real-world applications, time is the largest barrier to realizing the true value of automated optimization.
In theory, you should be able to find an optimized solution whenever you have a good system analysis model and an appropriate search algorithm. But if the model requires hours or even days of CPU time for each design evaluation, and the algorithm requires a large number of evaluations, then the total time required to reach that optimized solution may turn out to be completely impractical.
Let’s consider the cost factors involved. The total CPU time needed to find an optimized solution is defined this way:
where NSOL is the number of optimization solutions performed, and the expression inside the brackets represents the total search time per iteration of the optimization solution.
Based on this formula, there are only four ways you can reduce the solution time for an optimization study. You can
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