CAM colloquium - Friday, September 30
3:30 p.m.
253 Rhodes Hall

Speaker: John Dennis, Research Professor and Noah Harding
Professor Emeritus, Rice University, Houston, Texas

 

Title: "Optimal Placement of Tsunami Warning Buoys"

Abstract: In this talk, I will try to give the flavor of the process of applying optimization for the first time to a class of problems. In this case, the problem requires collaboration between a group of tsunami experts and a group of optimizers, but there are more general lessons here to be learned. It is typical that neither group knew much about the other's capabilities and concerns at the start. The major goal of the collaboration is to help formulate realistic goals for the project and then to achieve those goals.

The first step entails learning a bit of the client's terminology, and finding out what can be computed by the client group that might feed an optimization package. The burden is largely on the optimization group for this process, but in the present case, the tsunami experts were used to working with their own client groups, like the state and local governments where tsunamis threaten, and so they were remarkably helpful in the process.

A major milestone is the formulation of a test problem. Another is to successfully run optimization on the test problem and then interpret the results and reformulate the test problem. However, a great deal of progress must be made before this is possible. First it is necessary to formulate a reasonable test problem to see how difficult the optimization problem will be. The tsunami problem is of fairly low dimension, but nasty. It is at least nondifferentiable, if not discontinuous. Our optimization group is experienced in working on real-world applications, and so we are used to such problems, which motivated the development of our NOMAD package.

The project is now at a point that we can tackle the real buoy location problem, and it has led us to plans to direct our research towards modifications of NOMAD that will make it more efficient for the increasingly important class of sensor location problems.

 

Refreshments at 4:30 in 657 Rhodes Hall.