[BANANA] Seminar on TOMLAB (= MATLAB + Optimization)

[MIKE at sol-michael.stanford.edu]

ENGINEERING-ECONOMIC SYSTEMS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH
               COLLOQUIUM

SPEAKER:       Dr. Kenneth Holmstrom
               Center for Mathematical Modeling
               Malardalen University, Vasteras, Sweden
               hkh at mdh.se    http://www.ima.mdh.se/hkh

DATE AND TIME: Tuesday, April 4, 2000
               4:30-5:30pm

PLACE:         Thornton 102 (next to Terman)

TOPIC:         The TOMLAB Optimization Environment in Matlab

TOMLAB is a general-purpose Matlab environment aimed for the
solution of a wide range of optimization problems, as well as for
research and teaching in optimization. One motivation for TOMLAB
is to simplify research on applied optimization problems, giving
easy access to all types of solvers, while allowing full access to
the power of Matlab.  We discuss the design of TOMLAB, and present
some applications where it has been successfully used.

More than 65 different algorithms for linear, discrete and
nonlinear optimization are implemented. It is possible to call
solvers in the MathWorks Optimization Toolbox, and TOMLAB 2.0 also
has a call-compatible interface. We are currently working on
additional MEX-file interfaces to a large collection of
state-of-the-art general-purpose Fortran and C solvers, including
the SOL Optimization Software from Stanford and UCSD.

There are several ways to solve optimization problems in TOMLAB:
by a direct call to a solver, or using a general multi-solver
driver routine, or interactively, using a menu system or the
Graphical User Interface (GUI).

We discuss recent work in two of the strong areas of TOMLAB --
nonlinear parameter estimation and global optimization. New
algorithms for global optimization of costly functions show good
results on test problems and on the design of a passenger train
(optimizing the carbody and bogie masses, vibration frequencies,
etc).

More information on TOMLAB and a demo version for download are
available from the Applied Optimization and Modeling (TOM) group:
http://www.ima.mdh.se/tom.