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

TL;DR

DEFT-FUNNEL is an open-source global optimization solver designed for constrained grey-box and black-box problems, utilizing trust-region methods, polynomial surrogates, and multistart strategies, showing competitive performance on benchmark problems.

Contribution

It extends trust-region sequential quadratic optimization algorithms to a global solver that exploits both closed-form and black-box function information.

Findings

DEFT-FUNNEL performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

The solver effectively handles problems with mixed known and unknown functions.

Numerical experiments validate the efficiency and robustness of the approach.

Abstract

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 contributed for the design 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. It extends the previous works by Sampaio and Toint (2015, 2016) to a global optimization solver that is able to exploit information from closed-form functions. 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 other 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.