Amal FLIMINE

Engineering student at ENAC, Toulouse, France. Specialized in Air Operations & Safety with a double Master degree in Operational Research.

Interested in different fields of Optimization, I joined the Alliance team in April 2022 at the GERAD laboratory under the supervision of Sébastien Le Digabel, Charles Audet and Christophes Tribes.

Contact : amal.flimine@polymtl.ca

MADS is a derivative-free optimization algorithm that includes an exploration of the design space. It succeeds to direct-search algorithms such as Coordinate Search and Generalized Pattern Search, allowing for an infinite set of directions, and dealing with general inequality constraints. ¹⁾ MADS can use components to break free from local minimisers during the Search step and accelerate convergence to a better minimizer.

My project is to implement new search strategies in MADS based on:

1. Line-search, which simply takes a step from the current solution xk of length tk relative to a direction dk. The next incumbent solution needs to satisfy a minimal decrease on the criteria. An exploration of dfo line-search algorithms is necessary to implement this subroutine in Speculative Search.
2. DiRect, a shorthand for Dividing Rectangles, which is a hypercube-partitioning algorithm that aims to locate a feasible sub-region containing the global minimizer. ²⁾

• April 2022
• May 2022
• July 2022