• Eric de Sturler, Virginia Tech
• X.S. Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Structural design and optimization problems involve optimizing the shape of structures for a range of design objectives. This may include the layout of multiple materials, designing microstructures, handling many constraints, and considering large numbers of load cases or multiple scenarios. Fast and robust solution of these problems requires advanced optimization methods that in turn may require efficient computation or estimation of approximate gradients and possibly higher derivatives, appropriate step-size strategies, reduced order models or other surrogate models, and the solution of many linear systems at varying levels of accuracy.
In this minisymposium, we bring together researchers working on strategies to solve complex structural optimization problems more efficiently as well as researchers studying a range of relevant problems and problem variants. On the methods side this includes, among others, stochastic programming and randomization, efficient iterative solver strategies for stochastic approaches, model reduction, new nonlinear/optimization methods and relevant components, reanalysis methods, and methods tuned for specific problem cases (e.g., for many constraints). On the problem side, this includes, among others, various structural optimization problems and relevant aspects, like topology optimization, multi-material problems, uncertainty quantification, problems requiring sampling based algorithms, and problems with many constraints.