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The availability of several CPU cores on current computers enables parallelization and increases the computational power significantly. Optimization algorithms have to be adapted to exploit these highly parallelized systems and evaluate multiple candidate solutions in each iteration. This issue is especially challenging for expensive optimization problems, where surrogate models are employed to reduce the load of objective function evaluations.

This paper compares different approaches for surrogate model-based optimization in parallel environments. Additionally an easy to use method, which was developed for an industrial project, is proposed. All described algorithms are tested with a variety of standard benchmark functions. Furthermore, they are applied to a real-world engineering problem, the electrostatic precipitator problem. Expensive computational fluid dynamics simulations are required to estimate the …