ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a broad overview of the general subject of optimization: History of Optimization, the computer age, the scope of optimization, conventional/established optimization procedures and contemporary optimization: linear programming. It describes standard optimization procedures employed by engineers. These include such topics as brute force methods, perturbation schemes, elementary search methods, graphical approaches, and analytical methods. There are many optimization procedures available, most of them too detailed for meaningful application in a text of this nature. Increased growth is expected in the microcomputer field as inexpensive information-processing devices continue to be developed. Although the details of coding are not in the scope of this text, there is an intermediate step between the equations and the coding program, and that is to arrange the computing procedure in block diagram or information flow form. If the assumption of linearity cannot be made, as in the case of linear programming, there exist some general procedures for nonlinear problems.