• Elena Raponi, Leiden Unversity (LIACS)
• Simonetta Boria, University of Camerino
• Carola Doerr, CNRS, Sorbonne Université
• Fabian Duddeck, Technical University of Munich
• Dirk Lukaszewicz, BMW Group, Research and Innovation Centre

The Minisymposium "Advanced Approaches for Optimization of Composite Structures" will bring together researchers from academia and industry working on the development of optimization techniques that are suitable for efficiently designing mechanical components made of composite material.

Structural applications of composite materials involve the design and production of components by following very precise procedures that can lead to prohibitive times and costs, which are not easily affordable by industries. Since composite structures are usually tailored not only by choosing the individual constituents but also according to several aspects (such as their volume fractions, fiber orientation angles, and laminas thickness and number), the relevant design variables easily increase in number and include geometrical dimensions, as well as material properties. In this context, optimization models must be implemented to find practical optimal solutions satisfying a given set of design constraints. Moreover, the heterogeneous nature of fiber-reinforced composite materials makes them quite difficult to address numerically and to optimize.

Our minisymposium welcomes contributions aimed at providing innovative perspectives in the optimization of expensive, nonlinear, high-dimensional, and multi-modal objective functions that commonly characterize nonlinear mechanical problems dealing with structures in composite materials, e.g. in crashworthiness applications. Both applied and methodological studies will be considered, as valuable insights about (1) the current concrete results in the optimization of composites and (2) interesting optimization strategies that are transferable to real-world applications dealing with composite structures.
For example, contributions may address new developments in (non-exclusive list):

• Optimization techniques applied to composite structures
• Dealing with mixed-nature variables
• Techniques to efficiently handle mechanical constraints
• High dimensionality and complexity/dimensionality reduction techniques
• Shape and topology optimization
• Suitable numerical representations of composites
• Real and practical applications of the optimization with composites
• etc.