Several years ago, and in recognition of the growing 
importance of "Design Optimisation” to industrial CFD/CSM 
applications, ERCOFTAC has established a Special Interest 
Group, called SIG34. SIG34 now offers a course on “Design 
Optimisation” providing an information platform to 
supporting and fostering a comprehensive exchange between 
science and industry.

Nowadays, computational optimisation is both an emerging 
and wide-used technology in a variety of industrial 
sectors. Motivated by the maturity of the design-
optimisation methods and software as well as the advent of 
powerful modern computational platforms, new automated 
design optimisation methods have already been applied to 
numerous problems, e.g. in Computational Structural 
Mechanics (CSM), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), 
Electro-magnetics, Propulsion, Energy Management and many 
others. Moreover, combinations of these areas as so-called 
multi-disciplinary approaches (e.g. fluid-structure 
interaction, fluid-electro-magnetics interaction) are in 
use for achieving improvements in “real-world” industrial 
designs. 

Since traditional optimisation methods often require a 
significant number of solution points in the design space 
in order to reach an improved (or optimal) design, 
substantial effort has been devoted to device efficient 
search strategies. Moreover, they have already been adapted 
to multi-objective and multi-disciplinary problems in order 
to cope with real-world engineering applications

Lecturers 

Prof. Kyriakos Giannakoglou, National Technical U. of 
Athens, Greece 
Prof. Carlo Poloni, U. of Trieste, Italy 
Prof. Nicolas Gauger, RWTH U. Aachen, Germany
Dr. Ingrid Lepot, Cenaero, Belgium
Prof. Tom Verstraate, Von Karman Institute, Belgium 
Dr. Jacques Periaux, CIMNE, Spain 
Dr. Laurent Hascoet, INRIA, France 
Dr. Carsten. Othmer, VW, Germany