Introduction

You may solve an optimization problem with the ALIAS library by using one of the following procedures:

 
Minimize   Maximize        MinimizeGradient  MaximizeGradient
MinMax     MinMaxGradient

.

Note that these procedures are only special variants of the general solving procedures of ALIAS-Maple. Hence most of the parameters setting for these procedures are also valid for the optimization procedures. Specific parameters for these procedure are presented in section 5.3.

In the list of functions that are provided to these procedures the last one must be the function whose extremum are looked for, while the other one are supposed to be constraints. The interval solution that are returned will verify:

• for the constraints:
  • for inequality constraint: for any value of the unknowns within the solution ranges the inequality is strictly satisfied
  • for equality constraint: if the width of the interval solution is less than `ALIAS/epsilon` then the interval evaluation of the constraint include 0, while if this is not the case then the width of the interval evaluation of the function include 0 and its width is less than `ALIAS/fepsilon`
• for the function that is to be minimized or maximized: the real minimum or maximum of the function is at a distance at most `ALIAS/eepsilon` (default value: 1e-6) from the result provided by ALIAS

You may also us the gradient of the function to be minimize or maximized to improve the efficiency of the procedure. The MinimizeGradient and MaximizeGradient procedures may be used for this purpose and have the same argument than the Minimize and Maximize procedure.

There are also procedures to compute at the same time the minimum and maximum values of a function, eventually under constraint. The Minmax and MinMaxGradient procedures may be used for this purpose. The only difference with the previous procedures is that the arguments should be ended by Min, Max which provide the minimum and maximum of the function (being understood that the function that is considered is always the last in the list, the other one being the constraints).

However in that case a global variable of the ALIAS Maple library may play an important role:
`ALIAS/stop_minmax. Its default value is set to 0 but:

• if set to 1: the procedure will search the minimal and maximal value of the last function in the list but will exit if at some point it is shown that the minimum and maximum value have opposite sign. If this is not the case the procedure will still provide the minimal and maximal value of the function up to the given accuracy
• if set to 2: here the main purpose is to determine if the minimum and maximum of the function have the same sign. None of the Min, Max value will be significant from an optimum viewpoint: they are used only to indicate the sign of the extremum.

The flag allow_storage may also be of interest: if set to 1 (default value: 0) the current estimation of the optimum is written in the file .opti in a sequential way.

All these procedures accept optionally as least argument a string Simp that indicates the name of a simplification procedure (see chapter 4) whose C++ code is available in the file Simp.C. Among the simplification procedures provided by ALIAS-Maple the use of the HullIConsistency procedure with the key-word Optimum may be interest for an optimization problem, see section 4.2.1.

You may also specify initial value for the minimum or maximum value of the optimized function by setting `ALIAS/opt_min`, `ALIAS/opt_max`.