New advances for wedding optimization and simulation

Many real world problems in optimization are too complex to be given tractable mathematical formulations. Multiple nonlinearities, combinatorial relationships and uncertainties often render challenging practical problems inaccessible to modeling except by resorting to simulation-an outcome that poses grave difficulties for classical optimization methods. In such situations, recourse is commonly made to itemizing a series of scenarios in the hope that at least one will give an acceptable solution. Consequently, a long standing goal in both the optimization and simulation communities has been to create a way to guide a series of simulations to produce high quality solutions, in the absence of tractable mathematical structures. Recent innovations for integrating metaheuristics, classical optimization and artificial intelligence have produced a practical software system, called OptQuest, that is capable of guiding a series of simulations to uncover optimal or near optimal solution scenarios. The advances represented by this new system open new doors for simulation as well as extending the areas to which optimization can be applied. Within the brief span since it has come into existence, OptQuest has been used in several thousand real world applications that combine simulation and optimization, and has also been used to determine optimal parameters for other computer based decision tools, to increase their effectiveness