SADEA-II: A generalized method for efficient global optimization of antenna design

Efficiency improvement is of great significance for simulation-driven antenna design optimization methods based on evolutionary algorithms (EAs). The two main efficiency enhancement methods exploit data-driven surrogate models and/or multi-fidelity simulation models to assist EAs. However, optimization methods based on the latter either need ad hoc low-fidelity model setup or have difficulties in handling problems with more than a few design variables, which is a main barrier for industrial applications. To address this issue, a generalized three stage multi-fidelity-simulation-model assisted antenna design optimization framework is proposed in this paper. The main ideas include introduction of a novel data mining stage handling the discrepancy between simulation models of different fidelities, and a surrogate-model-assisted combined global and local search stage for efficient high-fidelity simulation model-based optimization. This framework is then applied to SADEA, which is a state-of-the-art surrogate-model-assisted antenna design optimization method, constructing SADEA-II. Experimental results indicate that SADEA-II successfully handles various discrepancy between simulation models and considerably outperforms SADEA in terms of computational efficiency while ensuring improved design quality. Highlights An EFFICIENT antenna design global optimization method for problems requiring very expensive EM simulations. A new multi-fidelity surrogate-model-based optimization framework to perform RELIABLE efficient global optimization A data mining method to address distortions of EM models of different fidelities (bottleneck of multi-fidelity design).