There are many areas in electrical as well electronics engineering where we can apply optimization to minimize objective function. For example to minimize Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) in multilevel Inverter researcher had applied optimization Technique (like GA,PSO etc).
In this forum researcher (specially electrical & electronics field) will get a overall idea where he/she can apply his optimization knowledge and give his contribution to existing system more improve in future.
Please share your own experience where you have applied optimization program.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this forum in advance.
What about Pareto optimal approaches? (http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/6/3/1439/pdf)
Quite important areas for mathematical optimization nowadays concern the design, installment in the geography, power generation principles, and the maintenance of renewable energy sources, such as wind power and solar energy. There are MANY problems to be looked at, and here are a couple for the wind case:
(a) Where do we install new wind farms, such that wind production is profitable (it blows a lot and also predictably), and the power units do not interact badly with respect to stealing wind from each other)?; such that the electricity is transported efficiently to where it is actually used?, and such that the power plants are available for inspection and maintenance at a low cost? Some of these objectives are in conflict, of course.
Similar questions are of course relevant also for solar power.
(b) How, when, and what do we replace once we have decided that something needs to be replaced? Shall we invest in wind power so that maintenance is needed less (at a larger design cost)? Shall we inspect more or less often, and shall we install measuring devises (plenty of opportunities exist) such that we can obtain automatic signals from the system? These signals could then of course be used to form optimization problem, the aim of which is to find when - based on risk of a major failure soon, production loss, cost of transport, work and equipment, ... - we should perform maintenance of some sort. Again we have multiple objectives.
And so on. These questions are focused on quite a lot in dedicated journals (and conferences), like several IEEE ones (for example, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems). Simply use Google on some of these terms and see what you find - you will not be empty-handed! :-)
Good luck!
My answer is restricted to analog electronics only.
I think, optimization is a principle that is (and must be) applied for nearly all analog circuits and systems. The background is as follows:
According to my experience, if we try to improve one particular parameter or property of an electronic sysytem, we can be sure that at the same time (at least !) another - perhaps equally important - parameter is degraded.
Thus, we have to find the "best" trade-off (compromize) between both.
And "best" can mean: Performance, reliability, cost, weight, power consumption,...etc.
Examples are numerous.
VLSI design is a very important problem in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Optimization problems of this form can come in many flavours that are often attacked as models in Graph Theory (in particular, Graph Drawing). Say if one is looking to minimize or design paths to be in particular locations, or minimize the lengths of paths, many of these problems are NP-hard, and Optimization techniques (whether approximation, or exact) may be employed.
The Switch Placement Problem (SPP) is a Combinatorial Optimization. Problem with large importance in Electrical Engineering, notably in power systems. Metaheuristics, live Evolutionary Algorithms, are applicable for tese problema.
Maximum power point tracking in wind energy, solar energy to get an optimized electrical output
Although "optimization methods" have wide application in vast areas of Engg. including EEE, in practice, optimizations find to be less valuable. Because,many times optimization deals with a few parameters of the system and neglects many other. Also mathematical modeling of systems like power grids, DGs, Inverters with inductive loads are quite difficult and highly nonlinear. Exhaustive search methods like GA, SA and PSO also find less attraction in practice although many journals or conference papers are publishing many researches in simulation studies.
In many practical cases the benefits we acquire through optimization are less efficient when compared to the effort required to develop the same in practice.
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