RBFOpt swMATH ID: 28416 Software Authors: Costa, Alberto; Nannicini, Giacomo Description: RBFOpt: an open-source library for black-box optimization with costly function evaluations. We consider the problem of optimizing an unknown function given as an oracle over a mixed-integer box-constrained set. We assume that the oracle is expensive to evaluate, so that estimating partial derivatives by finite differences is impractical. In the literature, this is typically called a black-box optimization problem with costly evaluation. This paper describes the solution methodology implemented in the open-source library RBFOpt, available on COIN-OR. The algorithm is based on the Radial Basis Function method originally proposed by Gutmann (J Glob Optim 19:201-227, 2001. url{doi:10.1023/A:1011255519438}), which builds and iteratively refines a surrogate model of the unknown objective function. The two main methodological contributions of this paper are an approach to exploit a noisy but less expensive oracle to accelerate convergence to the optimum of the exact oracle, and the introduction of an automatic model selection phase during the optimization process. Numerical experiments show that RBFOpt is highly competitive on a test set of continuous and mixed-integer nonlinear unconstrained problems taken from the literature: it outperforms the open-source solvers included in our comparison by a large amount, and performs slightly better than a commercial solver. Our empirical evaluation provides insight on which parameterizations of the algorithm are the most effective in practice. The software reviewed as part of this submission was given the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) url {doi:10.5281/zenodo.597767}. Homepage: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12532-018-0144-7 Source Code: https://github.com/coin-or/rbfopt/tree/4.1.2 Keywords: black-box optimization; derivative-free optimization; global optimization; radial basis function; open-source software; mixed-integer nonlinear programming Related Software: NOMAD; MISO; SO-I; BFO; DFL; OrthoMADS; BOBYQA; MultiMin; DFLBOX; DFLGEN; MCS; EGO; DFN; MINLPLib; SNOBFIT; MATSuMoTo; Bonmin; GitHub; NLopt; KNITRO Cited in: 9 Publications Standard Articles 2 Publications describing the Software, including 2 Publications in zbMATH Year On the implementation of a global optimization method for mixed-variable problems. Zbl 1497.90222Nannicini, Giacomo 2021 RBFOpt: an open-source library for black-box optimization with costly function evaluations. Zbl 1411.90005Costa, Alberto; Nannicini, Giacomo 2018 all top 5 Cited by 18 Authors 2 Liuzzi, Giampaolo 2 Lucidi, Stefano 2 Nannicini, Giacomo 2 Rinaldi, Francesco 1 Al-Dujaili, Abdullah 1 Bemporad, Alberto 1 Costa, Alberto L. C. 1 D’Ambrosio, Claudia 1 Giovannelli, Tommaso 1 Hamadi, Youssef 1 Larson, Jeffrey 1 Leyffer, Sven 1 Liberti, Leo 1 Palkar, Prashant 1 Ploskas, Nikolaos 1 Sahinidis, Nikolaos V. 1 Vu, Ky Khac 1 Wild, Stefan M. all top 5 Cited in 6 Serials 2 Journal of Global Optimization 2 Computational Optimization and Applications 2 Mathematical Programming Computation 1 Information Sciences 1 International Transactions in Operational Research 1 OJMO. Open Journal of Mathematical Optimization Cited in 2 Fields 9 Operations research, mathematical programming (90-XX) 2 Numerical analysis (65-XX) Citations by Year