Some time passed since
the last WCSMO-11 which was held in Sydney in June 2015. Still I know of
no regular conference which comes any close to the World Congress of Structural
and Multidisciplinary Optimization. The first OPTi in 2014 held in Kos
came close but I see no hint that OPTi will be continued.
To my opinion people
were (in the beginning) not happy to travel as far as Australia for
a conference - something like the place with the furthest traveling
distance for almost everyone I meet at conferences.
And indeed I missed
some participants from the US and Europe where on the other side
many speakers came from China. The total number of participant also was a
little below the previous numbers.
I personally was
disappointed by the average quality of the presentations. The two
worst presentations I attended were from the US and Europe and I had the
impression that both speakers did not even understand / could handle the
SIMP method at the level of the 99 lines code. But there were more disappointing
talks. To my personal opinion there are not too much groups worldwide driving
topology optimization further with solid research while there are still
plenty of challenging issues and problems, which can be solved by topology
optimization. I cannot compare this against the previous WCSMO’s due to
too many parallel sessions and I regularly missed some important talks.
So maybe it would be a
good idea to reduce the number of presentations and increase the average
quality for the WCSMO but concurrently introduce regional conferences where
PhD students have the opportunity to present their works and more
importantly can come into contact to their regional experts, especially
when they don’t stem from one of the established groups.
My highlight of the
WCSMO was the high-performance optimization done at the DTU and I
very much acknowledge that they contribute the PETSc base implementation
with a parallel linear elasticity, MMA, density filter and PDE filter.
More on that in a separate blog post.
To summarize, the
WCSMO-11 2015 in Sydney was again not only a good conference but
almost the only conference (to my knowledge) for structural optimization.
It was well organized; it was pretty cool to have a conference banquet at “Hogwarts”
(the great hall of the University of Sydney). I personally also enjoyed
Sydney and my short trip to the Blue Mountains.
What I really missed
was that there was no possibility to just sit (and talk) when I did not want
to attend a presentation. There was nothing like a lobby or close
cafeteria. Especially when it was cold and raining and one could not go
outside.
