Abstract:

Many difficult engineering problems cannot be solved by the conventional optimization techniques in practice. Direct searches that need no recourse to explicit derivatives are revived and become popular since the new century. In order to get a deep insight into this field, some notes on the direct searches for non-smooth optimization problems are made. The global convergence vs. local convergence and their influences on expected solutions for simulation-based stochastic optimization are pointed out. The sufficient and simple decrease criteria for step acceptance are analyzed, and why simple decrease is enough for globalization in direct searches is identified. The reason to introduce the positive spanning set and its usage in direct searches is explained. Other topics such as the generalization of direct searches to bound, linear and non-linear constraints are also briefly discussed.