Optimal Port Design Minimizing Standing Waves with A Posteriori Long Term Shoreline Sustainability Analysis

Optimization theory is applied to a coastal engineering problem that is the design of a port. This approach was applied to the redesign of La Turballe Port in order to increase the exploitable surface area and simultaneously reduce the occurrence of long waves within the port. Having defined the cost function as a weighted function of wave amplitude and with the chosen parameterization of the port, results show that an extended jetty and a widened mole yield a unique optimal solution. This work demonstrates that numerical optimization may be quick and efficient in the identification of port solutions consistent with classic engineering even in the context of complex problems.

SATISFICING SOLUTIONS TO A MONETARY POLICY PROBLEM

Herbert A. Simon, 1978 Economics Nobel Prize laureate, talked about satisficing (his neologism) rather than optimizing as being what economists really need. Indeed, optimization might be an unsuitable solution procedure (in that it suggests a unique “optimal” solution) for problems where many solutions could be satisfactory. We think that looking for an applicable monetary policy is a problem of this kind because there is no unique way in which a central bank can achieve a desired inflation (unemployment, etc.) path. We think that it is viability theory, which is a relatively young area of mathematics, that rigorously captures the essence of satisficing. We aim to use viability analysis to analyze a simple macro policy model and show how some robust adjustment rules can be endogenously obtained.