Blackbox optimization deals with situations in which the objective function and constraints are typically computed by launching a time-consuming computer sim- ulation. The subject of this work is the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) class of algorithms for blackbox optimization. We propose a way to dynamically scale the mesh, which is the discrete spatial structure … Read more
Accurate measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE) is an important factor in managing water resources for hydroelectric power generation. SWE over a catchment area may be estimated via kriging on measures obtained by snow monitoring devices positioned at strategic locations. The question studied in this paper is to find the device locations that minimize the … Read more
It has been shown recently that the efficiency of direct search methods that use opportunistic polling in positive spanning directions can be improved significantly by reordering the poll directions according to descent indicators built from simplex gradients. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we analyze the properties of simplex gradients of nonsmooth functions … Read more