DEFT-FUNNEL: an open-source global optimization solver for constrained grey-box and black-box problems

• Published in: Computational & applied mathematics Vol. 40; no. 5
• Main Author: Sampaio, Phillipe R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.07.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Applications of Mathematics; Applied physics; Artificial intelligence; Clustering; Computational mathematics; Computational Mathematics and Numerical Analysis; Global optimization; Interpolation; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical Applications in Computer Science; Mathematical Applications in the Physical Sciences; Mathematics; Mathematics and Statistics; Optimization; Polynomials; Solvers; Global optimization; 90-04; Constrained nonlinear optimization; Black-box optimization; 90C56; 90C26; Simulation-based optimization; Grey-box optimization; Derivative-free optimization
• ISSN: 2238-3603; 1807-0302
• DOI: 10.1007/s40314-021-01562-y

The fast-growing need for grey-box and black-box optimization methods for constrained global optimization problems in fields such as medicine, chemistry, engineering and artificial intelligence, has led to the development of new efficient algorithms for finding the best possible solution. In this work, we present DEFT-FUNNEL, an open-source global optimization algorithm for general constrained grey-box and black-box problems that belongs to the class of trust-region sequential quadratic optimization algorithms. Polynomial interpolation models are used as surrogates for the black-box functions and a clustering-based multistart strategy is applied for searching for the global minima. Numerical experiments show that DEFT-FUNNEL compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods on two sets of benchmark problems: one set containing problems where every function is a black box and another set with problems where some of the functions and their derivatives are known to the solver. The code as well as the test sets used for experiments are available at the Github repository http://github.com/phrsampaio/deft-funnel .