Engineering Design by Geometric Programming

A geometric program (GP) is a type of mathematical optimization problem characterized by objective and constraint functions, where all functions are of signomial form. The importance of GP comes from two relatively recent developments: (i) new methods can solve even large-scale GP extremely efficiently and reliably; (ii) a number of practical problems have recently been found to be equivalent to or approximated by GP. This study proposes an optimization approach for solving GP. Our approach is first to convert all signomial terms in GP into convex and concave terms. Then the concave terms are further treated with the proposed piecewise linearization method where only binary variables are used. It has the following features: (i) it offers more convenient and efficient means of expressing a piecewise linear function; (ii) fewer 0-1 variables are used; (iii) the computational results show that the proposed method is much more efficient and faster than the conventional one, especially when the number of break points becomes large. In addition, the engineering design problems are illustrated to evaluate the usefulness of the proposed methods.