Semi-Automatic Antenna Design Via Sampling and Visualization
| Citation: |
Quigley, A.; Leigh, D.L.; Lesh, N.B.; Marks, J.W.; Ryall, K.; Wittenburg, K.B., "Semi-Automatic Antenna Design via Sampling and Visualization", IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, Vol. 2, pp. 342-345, June 2002 (IEEE Xplore) |
| MERL Report: | TR2002-02 |
Optimization-based approaches to antenna design have enjoyed limited success. The task is often computationally intractable. Moreover, it is also often difficult to capture all relevant design issues and tradeoffs in a single mathematical objective function. Therefore, human experts typically specify and refine antenna designs "by hand," using computers only to evaluate their candidate designs by simulation. In this paper we propose a middle ground between this traditional approach and fully automatic optimization. We use computation to sample a space of possible antenna designs, and we rely on human judgment to select good designs from the samples returned by the computer. The key elements of our computer system are a parallel algorithm for intelligently sampling a space of possible antenna designs and a graphical user interface for visualizing and exploring candidate designs and managing the sampling process.
