As part of the UTOPIAE outreach programme, the educational app has been developed to further communicate the research ideas evolved during the project and to provide a useful tool to engage students with educational material. In addition, the developed app investigates the feasibility of offering optimisation as a service through an online service.
Two engineering problems were selected, from aerospace – an active debris removal problem, and from structural engineering – a cantilever beam problem. For more variation, a third, open objective problem was also developed. All three problems were developed into an app, which allows a user to run them with the MP-AIDEA or MACS algorithms to perform optimisation. Testing of this app proved it to be robust and useful, proving the feasibility of having an interactive optimisation tool in engineering and other fields. The app’s accessibility makes it a useful tool for teaching optimisation. Also, it allows developers to gather information on the algorithms, as the app saves data from each optimisation.
The app can be downloaded via the OPTIMISATIONPRIME website.
