Opossum (OPtimizatiOn System with SUrrogate Models)—a new optimization plug-in for Grasshopper available on food4rhino —and RBFOpt—a model-based, black-box optimization library—have jointly won the COIN-OR Cup 2016!
Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN) is an international initiative to spur the development of open-source software for the operations research community. The award committee recognized the use of state-of-the-art mathematical optimization tools in a context that is historically skeptical about them, the effort to increase awareness of the potential of mathematical optimization within the architecture community and its easy-to-use interface for non-experts.
Opossum is the first model-based optimization tool for Grasshopper. It is based on the RBFOpt library and has a GUI similar to Galapagos. Opossum uses advanced machine learning techniques to find good solutions with a small number of evaluations. Its specialty is finding close to optimal solutions in 100-300 evaluations, while other types of algorithms typically need many more steps.
This paper presents benchmark results comparing an early version of Opossum, Galapagos, and Goat.
Posted Jan 20, 2017 by Elena Caneva on Rhino News, etc.