Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “objective function”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 271 records · Page 15

Pareto solutions in multicriteria optimization under uncertainty

We present and analyze several definitions of Pareto optimality for multicriteria optimization or decision problems with uncertainty primarily in their objective function values. In comparison to related notions of Pareto robustness, we first provide a full characterization of an alternative efficient set hierarchy that is based on six different ordering relations both with respect to the multiple objectives and a possibly finite, countably infinite or uncountable number of scenarios. We then establish several scalarization results for the generation of the corresponding efficient points using generalized weighted-sum and epsilon-constraint techniques. Finally, we leverage these scalarization results to also derive more general conditions for the existence of efficient points in each of the corresponding optimality classes, under suitable assumptions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Optimization-based control using input convex neural networks

Input convex neural networks (ICNNs) are a family of deep learning models where the outputs are constructed to be convex functions of the inputs. By parameterizing system models using ICNNs, optimization-based control problems can be solved as convex optimization problems, leading to improved performance and robustness. This work proposes a novel framework where the control objective function and constraints are modelled using ICNNs. A case study of optimization-based control with output constraints is conducted on a process with input multiplicity and nonminimum phase behavior. The simulation results demonstrate improved economic yield compared with normal neural networks. Additionally, the input convexity formulation is compared with simple regularization techniques, and unique benefits such as improved data efficiency and robustness of the proposed formulation are shown. Finally, by explicitly incorporating prior knowledge about convexity, this framework provides a good balance between the universal approximation power of deep learning and computational feasibility required by control.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Density-Functional Tight-Binding Parameters for Bulk Zirconium: A Case Study for Repulsive Potentials

Density-functional tight-binding (DFTB) parameters are presented for the simulation of the bulk phases of zirconium. Electronic parameters were obtained using a band structure fitting strategy, while two-center repulsive potentials were created by particle swarm optimization. As objective functions for the repulsive potential fitting, we employed the Birch–Murnaghan equations of state for hexagonal close-packed (HCP), body-centered cubic (BCC) and ω phases of Zr from density-functional theory (DFT). When fractional atomic coordinates are not allowed to change in the generation of the equation-of-state curves, long-range repulsive DFTB potentials are able to almost perfectly reproduce equilibrium structures, relative DFT energies of the bulk phases, and bulk moduli. However, the same potentials lead to artifacts in the DFTB potential energy surfaces when atom positions in the unit cell are allowed to fully relax during the change of unit cell parameters. Finally, conventional short-range repulsive DFTB potentials, while inferior in their ability to reproduce DFT bulk energetics, are able to correctly reproduce the qualitative shape of the DFT potential energy surfaces, including the location of global minima, and can therefore be considered more transferable.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Optimization of the artificial viscosity in Lagrangian staggered discretization codes. Modeling 1D stand-alone shock - case study

We have developed new measures of errors for numerical shock. The new approach is based on analysis of the structure function, and separation of the errors related to oscillations and shock width, which also include error in the position of the ”center” of the numerical shock. We have demonstrated that those measures correctly characterize the numerical solution. We introduced an objective function in, which both types of errors are weighted, and presented optimal values of the coefficients of the linear and quadratic viscosity for different weights and different Mach numbers.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

In-flight demonstration of the Space Station Freedom Health Maintenance Facility fluid therapy system (E300/E05)

The Space Station Freedom (SSF) Health Maintenance Facility (HMF) will provide medical care for crew members for up to 10 days. An integral part of the required medical care consists of providing intravenous infusion of fluids, electrolyte solutions, and nutrients to sustain an ill or injured crew member. In terrestrial health care facilities, intravenous solutions are normally stored in large quantities. However, due to the station's weight and volume constraints, an adequate supply of the required solutions cannot be carried onboard SSF. By formulating medical fluids onboard from concentrates and station water as needed, the Fluid Therapy System (FTS) eliminates weight and volume concerns regarding intravenous fluids. The first full-system demonstration of FTS is continuous microgravity will be conducted in Spacelab-Japan (SL-J). The FTS evaluation consists of two functional objectives and an in-flight demonstration of intravenous administration of fluids. The first is to make and store sterile water and IV solutions onboard the spacecraft. If intravenous fluids are to be produced in SSF, successful sterilization of water and reconstituting of IV solutions must be achieved. The second objective is to repeat the verification of the FTS infusion pump, which had been performed in Spacelab Life Sciences - 1 (SLS-1). during SLS-1, the FTS IV pump was operated in continuous microgravity for the first time. The pump functioned successfully, and valuable knowledge on its performance in continuous microgravity was obtained. Finally, the technique of starting an IF in microgravity will be demonstrated. The IV technique requires modifications in microgravity, such as use of restraints for equipment and crew members involved.

Lloyd, Charles W.↗

Multi-Objective Hybrid Optimal Control for Interplanetary Mission Planning

Preliminary design of low-thrust interplanetary missions is a highly complex process. The mission designer must choose discrete parameters such as the number of flybys, the bodies at which those flybys are performed, and in some cases the final destination. Because low-thrust trajectory design is tightly coupled with systems design, power and propulsion characteristics must be chosen as well. In addition, a time-history of control variables must be chosen which defines the trajectory. There are often many thousands, if not millions, of possible trajectories to be evaluated. The customer who commissions a trajectory design is not usually interested in a point solution, but rather the exploration of the trade space of trajectories between several different objective functions. This can be very expensive process in terms of the number of human analyst hours required. An automated approach is therefore very desirable. This work presents such an approach by posing the mission design problem as a multi-objective hybrid optimal control problem. The methods is demonstrated on hypothetical mission to the main asteroid belt and to Deimos.

Trajectory Design↗

Multi-Objective Hybrid Optimal Control for Multiple-Flyby Low-Thrust Mission Design

Preliminary design of low-thrust interplanetary missions is a highly complex process. The mission designer must choose discrete parameters such as the number of flybys, the bodies at which those flybys are performed, and in some cases the final destination. In addition, a time-history of control variables must be chosen that defines the trajectory. There are often many thousands, if not millions, of possible trajectories to be evaluated. The customer who commissions a trajectory design is not usually interested in a point solution, but rather the exploration of the trade space of trajectories between several different objective functions. This can be a very expensive process in terms of the number of human analyst hours required. An automated approach is therefore very desirable. This work presents such an approach by posing the mission design problem as a multi-objective hybrid optimal control problem. The method is demonstrated on a hypothetical mission to the main asteroid belt.

Optimization↗

Multi-Objective Hybrid Optimal Control for Interplanetary Mission Planning

Preliminary design of low-thrust interplanetary missions is a highly complex process. The mission designer must choose discrete parameters such as the number of flybys, the bodies at which those flybys are performed, and in some cases the final destination. Because low-thrust trajectory design is tightly coupled with systems design, power and propulsion characteristics must be chosen as well. In addition, a time-history of control variables must be chosen which defines the trajectory. There are often may thousands, if not millions, of possible trajectories to be evaluated. The customer who commissions a trajectory design is not usually interested in a point solution, but rather the exploration of the trade space of trajectories between several different objective functions. This can be a very expensive process in terms of the number of human analyst hours required. An automated approach is therefore very desirable. This work presents such an approach by posing the mission design problem as a multi-objective hybrid optimal control problem. The method is demonstrated on hypothetical mission to the main asteroid belt and to Deimos.

Low Thrust↗

Multi-Objective Hybrid Optimal Control for Multiple-Flyby Interplanetary Mission Design using Chemical Propulsion

Preliminary design of high‐thrust interplanetary missions is a highly complex process. The mission designer must choose discrete parameters such as the number of flybys and the bodies at which those flybys are performed. For some missions, such as surveys of small bodies, the mission designer also contributes to target selection. In addition, real‐valued decision variables, such as launch epoch, flight times, maneuver and flyby epochs, and flyby altitudes must be chosen. There are often many thousands of possible trajectories to be evaluated. The customer who commissions a trajectory design is not usually interested in a point solution, but rather the exploration of the trade space of trajectories between several different objective functions. This can be a very expensive process in terms of the number of human analyst hours required. An automated approach is therefore very desirable. This work presents such an approach by posing the impulsive mission design problem as a multi‐objective hybrid optimal control problem. The method is demonstrated on several real‐world problems. Two assumptions are frequently made to simplify the modeling of an interplanetary high‐thrust trajectory during the preliminary design phase. The first assumption is that because the available thrust is high, any maneuvers performed by the spacecraft can be modeled as discrete changes in velocity. This assumption removes the need to integrate the equations of motion governing the motion of a spacecraft under thrust and allows the change in velocity to be modeled as an impulse and the expenditure of propellant to be modeled using the time‐independent solution to Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation [1]. The second assumption is that the spacecraft moves primarily under the influence of the central body, i.e. the sun, and all other perturbing forces may be neglected in preliminary design. The path of the spacecraft may then be modeled as a series of conic sections. When a spacecraft performs a close approach to a planet, the central body switches from the sun to that planet and the trajectory is modeled as a hyperbola with respect to the planet. This is known as the method of patched conics. The impulsive and patched‐conic assumptions significantly simplify the preliminary design problem.

Optimization↗

Multi-Objective Hybrid Optimal Control for Interplanetary Mission Planning

Preliminary design of low-thrust interplanetary missions is a highly complex process. The mission designer must choose discrete parameters such as the number of flybys, the bodies at which those flybys are performed and in some cases the final destination. In addition, a time-history of control variables must be chosen which defines the trajectory. There are often many thousands, if not millions, of possible trajectories to be evaluated. The customer who commissions a trajectory design is not usually interested in a point solution, but rather the exploration of the trade space of trajectories between several different objective functions. This can be a very expensive process in terms of the number of human analyst hours required. An automated approach is therefore very diserable. This work presents such as an approach by posing the mission design problem as a multi-objective hybrid optimal control problem. The method is demonstrated on a hypothetical mission to the main asteroid belt.

Optimization↗

A Combined Day-ahead and Real-time approach for Scheduling Real and Reactive power dispatch of Battery Energy Storage System

A combined day-ahead (look-ahead) and real-time optimization approach is proposed to schedule BESS real and reactive power dispatch. The look ahead scheduling agent maximizes profit and essentially performs the function of energy arbitrage by looking at forecasted prices, network constraints and BESS operating conditions to generate real power dispatch schedule. While this schedule is followed, the real time optimization agent computes an optimum reactive power set-point (for a particular objective function) using optimal power flow framework. The concepts are implemented by co-simulating legacy tools and demonstrated on a large real world distribution system. In addition to the profits from energy arbitrage, optimum reactive power set point computation results in achieving desirable network attributes like flat voltage profiles and minimizing voltage deviations from desired value.

Bhatti, Bilal A.↗

Not so HOT Triangulations

Here, we propose primal–dual mesh optimization algorithms that overcome shortcomings of the standard algorithm while retaining some of its desirable features. “Hodge-Optimized Triangulations” defines the “HOT energy” as a bound on the discretization error of the diagonalized Delaunay Hodge star operator. HOT energy is a natural choice for an objective function, but unstable for both mathematical and algorithmic reasons: it has minima for collapsed edges, and its extrapolation to non-regular triangulations is inaccurate and has unbounded minima. We propose a different extrapolation with a stronger theoretical foundation, and avoid extrapolation by recalculating the objective just beyond the flip threshold. We propose new objectives, based on normalizations of the HOT energy, with barriers to edge collapses and other undesirable configurations. We propose mesh improvement algorithms coupling these. When HOT optimization nearly collapses an edge, we actually collapse the edge. Otherwise, we use the barrier objective to update positions and weights and remove vertices. By combining discrete connectivity changes with continuous optimization, we more fully explore the space of possible meshes and obtain higher quality solutions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Solution of nonlinear finite difference ocean models by optimization methods with sensitivity and observational strategy analysis

The paper studies with finite difference nonlinear circulation models the uncertainties in interesting flow properties, such as western boundary current transport, potential and kinetic energy, owing to the uncertainty in the driving surface boundary condition. The procedure is based upon nonlinear optimization methods. The same calculations permit quantitative study of the importance of new information as a function of type, region of measurement and accuracy, providing a method to study various observing strategies. Uncertainty in a model parameter, the bottom friction coefficient, is studied in conjunction with uncertain measurements. The model is free to adjust the bottom friction coefficient such that an objective function is minimized while fitting a set of data to within prescribed bounds. The relative importance of the accuracy of the knowledge about the friction coefficient with respect to various kinds of observations is then quantified, and the possible range of the friction coefficients is calculated.

Schroeter, Jens↗

The Katydid system for compiling KEE applications to Ada

Components of a system known as Katydid are developed in an effort to compile knowledge-based systems developed in a multimechanism integrated environment (KEE) to Ada. The Katydid core is an Ada library supporting KEE object functionality, and the other elements include a rule compiler, a LISP-to-Ada translator, and a knowledge-base dumper. Katydid employs translation mechanisms that convert LISP knowledge structures and rules to Ada and utilizes basic prototypes of a run-time KEE object-structure library module for Ada. Preliminary results include the semiautomatic compilation of portions of a simple expert system to run in an Ada environment with the described algorithms. It is suggested that Ada can be employed for AI programming and implementation, and the Katydid system is being developed to include concurrency and synchronization mechanisms.

Filman, Robert E.↗

Model predictive control for matrix converter operating in current control mode with load current estimation

A matrix converter system operating in current control mode is provided. The matrix converter includes a switching matrix coupled between a low voltage side and a high voltage side, wherein the matrix converter is coupled at its low voltage side to a generator for receiving an input power including an input current and transforming the input power into an output power at its high voltage side, wherein a load is coupled to the high voltage side. The control system includes a load observer and a model predictive controller (MPC). The load observer is configured to estimate a load current that flows to the load from the high voltage side of the matrix converter as a function of a switching state of the switching matrix, an output voltage output at the high voltage side of the matrix converter, and the input current. The MPC is configured to select the switching state of the switching matrix to meet one or more control objectives defined by minimization of a multi-objective function that tracks the output voltage and the input current using the estimated load current.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Gradient-informed Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for multicomponent CALPHAD model optimization and uncertainty quantification

CALPHAD model parameter optimization is inherently challenging due to non-smooth objective functions, high-dimensional parameter spaces, and the need for uncertainty quantification (UQ). Traditional weighted nonlinear least squares approaches are computationally efficient but local, whereas black-box global optimizers and ensemble Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide broader exploration at substantial computational cost. The objective of this work is to combine the global exploration capability of gradient-informed Hamiltonian Monte Carlo – specifically the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) – with local deterministic refinement using BFGS to efficiently optimize multicomponent CALPHAD models with minimal manual intervention. Analytic gradients are computed via the Jansson derivative framework. The methodology is demonstrated on the Cr—Fe binary system and extended to the Cr—Fe—Ni ternary system with 32 degrees of freedom. For Cr—Fe, NUTS achieves comparable or superior optimality relative to ensemble MCMC while requiring over an order-of-magnitude fewer likelihood evaluations. Parameter uncertainties are quantified through NUTS sampling and propagated to thermodynamic observables using local expansion, demonstrating a novel modular approach that combines binary and ternary parameter subsets without requiring global relaxation. These results establish gradient-informed exploration as a scalable strategy for multicomponent CALPHAD optimization and provide a practical route towards efficient higher-order database development with quantified uncertainty.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Adaptive Quantum Generative Training using an Unbounded Loss Function

We propose a generative quantum learning algorithm using the Adaptive Derivative-Assembled Problem Tailored ansatz (ADAPT) framework in which the loss function to be minimized is the maximal quantum Rényi divergence of order two, an unbounded function that mitigates barren plateaus which inhibit training variational circuits. We benchmark this method against other state-of-the-art adaptive algorithms by learning random two-local thermal states. We perform numerical experiments of up to 12 qubits comparing our method learning algorithms that use linear objective functions and show that Rényi-ADAPT is capable of constructing shallow quantum circuits competitive with existing methods, while the gradients remain favorable resulting from the maximal Rényi divergence loss function.

quantum algorithms, quantum machine learning, quan↗

A Sequential Quadratic Programming Algorithm for Nonsmooth Problems with Upper- \({\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}^2}}\) Objective

An optimization algorithm for nonsmooth nonconvex constrained optimization problems with upper- \({\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}^2}}\) objective functions is proposed and analyzed. Upper- \({\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}^2}}\) is a weakly concave property that exists in difference of convex (DC) functions and arises naturally in many applications, particularly certain classes of solutions to parametric optimization problems e.g., recourse of stochastic programming and projection onto closed sets. The algorithm can be viewed as an extension of sequential quadratic programming (SQP) to nonsmooth problems with upper- \({\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}^2}}\) objectives or a simplified bundle method. It is globally convergent with bounded algorithm parameters that are updated with a trust-region criterion. The algorithm handles general smooth constraints through linearization and uses a line search to ensure progress. The potential inconsistencies from the linearization of the constraints are addressed through a penalty method. In conclusion, the capabilities of the algorithm are demonstrated by solving both simple upper- \({\boldsymbol{\mathcal{C}^2}}\) problems and a real-world optimal power flow problem used in current power grid industry practices.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗