Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Applications of black-box algorithms occur in various domains. Industry but also researchers in other academic domains have a great need to apply black-box algorithms on a daily basis. We do not target a specific application domain and are interested in possible black-box applications stemming from various origins. This is for us intrinsic to the nature of the methods we develop that are general purpose algorithms. Hence our strategy with respect to applications can be seen as opportunistic and our main selection criteria when approached by colleagues who want to develop a collaboration around an application is whether we judge the application interesting: that is the application brings new challenges and/or gives us the opportunity to work on topics we already intended to work on.

The concrete applications related to industrial collaborations we are currently dealing with are:

• With Thales for the theses of Konstantinos Varelas and Paul Dufossé (DGA-CIFRE theses) related to the design of radars (shape optimization of the wave form). Those theses investigate the development of large-scale variants of CMA-ES and constrained-handling for CMA-ES.

• With Storengy, a subsidiary of Engie specialized in gas storage for the thesis of Cheikh Touré. Different multiobjective applications are considered in this context but the primary motivation of Storengy is to get at their disposal a better multiobjective variant of CMA-ES which is the main objective of the developments within the thesis.

• With PSA in the context of the OpenLab and the thesis of Marie-Ange Dahito for the design of part of a car body.

• With Onera in the context of the thesis of Alann Cheral related to the optimization of the choice of hyperspectral bandwidth.