Doctoral students leapfrog their way to optimization, innovation

摘要

We are doctoral students in chemical engineering, with a focus on advanced process control (APC) and optimization at Oklahoma State University (OSU). With the guidance of our advisor, Dr. R. Russell Rhinehart, professor of chemical engineering, we are focused on developing a recently discovered Leapfrogging optimization technique and demonstrating its applicability in APC. Leapfrogging (LF) is a multiplayer, direct search, optimization technique. Initially, "players" are placed at random spots in the feasible decision variable space. The approach to reaching the global optimum is for a player with the worst objective function to "leapfrog" over the player with the best objective function to a new position into the reflected hyper-volume. This optimization technique is stopped when there is no statistical improvement relative to the data - when all players converge to a common optimum.