April 13, 2020
pSeven 6.16.3 Release
DATADVANCE development team announces the release of the pSeven 6.16.3 update. This release brings several internal improvements in surrogate-based optimization and adaptive design of experiments, which contribute to their performance, algorithm stability and quality, and also resolves a few issues.
The release focuses on the Design space exploration block. We continue the development of optimization and space exploration algorithms which work under the hood in such techniques as Surrogate-based optimization and Adaptive design. With the recent updates, these algorithms have clearly shown a performance increase in test problems (less solving time, faster DoE generation). We expect this increase to be noticeable even in real problems where response evaluations usually are computationally expensive, so they become the limiting factor.
The Adaptive design technique algorithms are now more stable in tasks with discrete variables and linear constraints, and should provide a DoE which is better suited for approximation model training than the one generated in previous versions. Note that some of these improvements required significant changes in algorithm behavior, so pSeven 6.16.3 normally does not exactly reproduce results from version 6.16.2.
After the 6.16.2 release, one of our customers had kindly reported a rather complex and rare configuration issue in the Design space exploration block: when configured to read a full set of some variable's properties from its input ports, the block could stop in a deadlock because it failed to resolve input dependencies. To resolve this issue, we had to tweak one of the input processing rules, which determines the ports required to start. This change is not going to affect any workflows, except those where the Design space exploration block is specifically configured to read all variable-related settings from input ports.
pSeven 6.16.3 contains a few other minor improvements and bugfixes, which you can find described in the release changelog. It is a recommended update, which includes all enhancements introduced in pSeven 6.16 and later. If you are planning to update from an earlier version of pSeven, it is also recommended to skip previous versions and update directly to pSeven 6.16.3.