Thomas Wortmann, Aloysius Lian and Dimitry Demin from AAL will be offering a workshop titled “Optimize this!” at the upcoming Advances in Architectural Geometry (AAG) conference at ETH Zurich that will take place 9-13 September 2016.
The workshop will provide an introduction to and hands-on experience with global, single-objective, black-box optimisation for architectural designers. Participants will learn about three major classes of black-box optimisation algorithms – Metaheuristics, Direct Search, and Surrogate Model-based Optimisation – and experiment with one algorithm from each category: Genetic Algorithms, DIRECT, and Radial Basis Functions. Specifically, the workshop will offer an opportunity to learn about and experiment with model-based optimisation as a novel optimisation method in the architectural design context, and to compare it with other existing methods through benchmarking. Participants will be able to experiment with example problems from sustainable and structural design optimization. Participants will also be encouraged to bring optimization problems from their own practices and research. As an outcome, AAL expects benchmark results for a large and diverse set of optimization problems. These results could easily combine into the most extensive test of global optimization algorithms in the architectural design context.