Francesco Rinaldi

Finite-Element-Based Multiobjective Design Optimization Procedure of Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors for Wide Constant-Power Region Operation

This paper proposes the design optimization procedure of three-phase interior permanent magnet (IPM) synchronous motors with minimum weight, maximum power output, and suitability for wide constant-power region operation. The particular rotor geometry of the IPM synchronous motor and the presence of several variables and constraints make the design problem very complicated. The authors propose to combine an accurate finite-element analysis with a multiobjective optimization procedure using a new algorithm belonging to the class of controlled random search algorithms. The optimization procedure has been employed to design two IPM motors for industrial application and a city electrical scooter. A prototype has been realized and tested. The comparison between the predicted and measured performances shows the reliability of the simulation results and the effectiveness, versatility, and robustness of the proposed procedure.

Concave programming for minimizing the zero-norm over polyhedral sets

Given a non empty polyhedral set, we consider the problem of finding a vector belonging to it and having the minimum number of nonzero components, i.e., a feasible vector with minimum zero-norm. This combinatorial optimization problem is NP-Hard and arises in various fields such as machine learning, pattern recognition, signal processing. One of the contributions of this paper is to propose two new smooth approximations of the zero-norm function, where the approximating functions are separable and concave. In this paper we first formally prove the equivalence between the approximating problems and the original nonsmooth problem. To this aim, we preliminarily state in a general setting theoretical conditions sufficient to guarantee the equivalence between pairs of problems. Moreover we also define an effective and efficient version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for the minimization of concave separable functions over polyhedral sets in which variables which are null at an iteration are eliminated for all the following ones, with significant savings in computational time, and we prove the global convergence of the method. Finally, we report the numerical results on test problems showing both the usefulness of the new concave formulations and the efficiency in terms of computational time of the implemented minimization algorithm.

A patient adaptable ECG beat classifier based on neural networks

A novel supervised neural network-based algorithm is designed to reliably distinguish in electrocardiographic (ECG) records between normal and ischemic beats of the same patient. The basic idea behind this paper is to consider an ECG digital recording of two consecutive R-wave segments (RRR interval) as a noisy sample of an underlying function to be approximated by a fixed number of Radial Basis Functions (RBF). The linear expansion coefficients of the RRR interval represent the input signal of a feed-forward neural network which classifies a single beat as normal or ischemic. The system has been evaluated using several patient records taken from the European ST-T database. Experimental results show that the proposed beat classifier is very reliable, and that it may be a useful practical tool for the automatic detection of ischemic episodes.

An approach to constrained global optimization based on exact penalty functions

In the field of global optimization many efforts have been devoted to solve unconstrained global optimization problems. The aim of this paper is to show that unconstrained global optimization methods can be used also for solving constrained optimization problems, by resorting to an exact penalty approach. In particular, we make use of a non-differentiable exact penalty function

New results on the equivalence between zero-one programming and continuous concave programming

{P_q(x;\varepsilon)}

A concave optimization-based approach for sparse portfolio selection

. We show that, under weak assumptions, there exists a threshold value

\ell_1

{\bar \varepsilon >0 }