A brief survey of robust optimization

To counteract the performance degradation in electromagnetic devices due to mechanical tolerances, assembly inaccuracies, poor knowledge of material parameters, etc., many robust design techniques have been proposed. A first class of methods takes advantage from statistical analysis to improve the average performance taking into account actual, randomly distributed values rather than the nominal figure of the parameters design values. A second class, making use of the "sensitivity" of device performance with respect to different parameters, looks for solutions as insensitive as possible with respect to possible modifications of the design parameters. In this paper, with the aim of presenting a synthetic selection of existing methods, a brief survey of the different approaches is presented. A simple test case is considered for demonstration purposes.