Innovization: innovating design principles through optimization

Abstract

This paper introduces a new design methodology (we call it "innovization") in the context of finding new and innovative design principles by means of optimization techniques. Although optimization algorithms are routinely used to find an optimal solution corresponding to an optimization problem, the task of innovization stretches the scope beyond an optimization task and attempts to unveil new, innovative, and important design principles relating to decision variables and objectives, so that a deeper understanding of the problem can be obtained. The variety of problems chosen in the paper and the resulting innovations obtained for each problem amply demonstrate the usefulness of the innovization task. The results should encourage a wide spread applicability of the proposed innovization procedure (which is not simply an optimization procedure) to other problem-solving tasks.