Chapter 13: Discussion and Recommendations

Simulation-driven design of antenna structures is an exciting area of research yet of paramount importance for engineering practice. One of its fundamental challenges is high computational cost of full-wave electromagnetic (EM) antenna analysis. High-fidelity EM simulation models are necessary to ensure accurate evaluation of the antenna performance but their optimization using conventional numerical techniques is impractical or — in extreme cases — even prohibitive. Multi-objective optimization, the main focus of this book, is considerably more challenging because the aim is to find the entire set of designs that represent the best possible trade-offs between several (and often conflicting) objectives. In multi-objective design, the high cost of evaluating an antenna structure becomes a more serious bottleneck than for single-objective optimization. Another important issue is multi-dimensionality of the design space and potentially wide ranges of geometry parameters of the antenna. In particular, global search needs to be involved, first to identify a relevant portion of the design space (the one that contains Pareto-optimal designs), then to find a representation of the Pareto front. None of these can be executed directly at the level of EM-simulation models, especially if optimization is conducted using population-based metaheuristics…