*** 9614041 Belegundu Mistree This grant provides partial support to conduct a workshop on the use of optimization in industry, particularly in applications relating to engineering design. The workshop will bring together engineers, mathematicians, operations research specialists, and researchers from academe to discuss current limitations on the applications of optimization and to provide a research agenda that could help to broaden current applications. The discussion will also examine other roadblocks to the expanded use of optimization in industry and propose solutions to overcoming these roadblocks. Representatives from the aerospace, automotive, civil, chemical, and mechanical disciplines of engineering will be invited. Competitiveness of manufactured products often depends on design subtleties that are subject to optimization. Optimization can enable products to perform better in use, be manufactured at lower cost, and have improved reliability and lower environmental impact. To date, however, there has been a disconnect between the academic communities researching new optimization techniques and the industries that potentially would use them. The result has been that the applications of optimization techniques in industry has substantially lagged the development of new methods. This workshop seeks to bridge this gap and find ways to make current research in the field more applicable to industry, and to bring industry into the research agenda-setting process so that future advances are more relevant to the need of industry. ***
