A new look at the topographical global optimization method and its application to the phase stability analysis of mixtures

Optimization methods that use optimality conditions of first and/or second order are known to be efficient. Commonly, such iterative methods are developed and analyzed in the light of knowledge concerning the mathematical analysis in n-dimensional Euclidean spaces, whose nature is of local character. Consequently, these methods lead to iterative algorithms that perform only local searches. Thus, the application of such algorithms to the calculation of global minimizers of a non-linear function, especially non-convex and multimodal, depends strongly on the location of the starting points. The Topographical Global Optimization method is a clustering algorithm, which uses an ingenious approach based on elementary concepts of graph theory, in order to generate good starting points for local search methods, from points distributed uniformly in the interior of the feasible set. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. The first is a revisit to the Topographical Global Optimization method, where, for the first time, its foundations are formally described and its basic properties are mathematically proven. In this context, we propose a semi-empirical formula for computing the key parameter of this clustering algorithm, and, using a robust and efficient direction interior-point method, we extend the use of the Topographical Global Optimization method to problems with inequality constraints. The second objective is the application of this method to the phase stability analysis of mixtures, a difficult and important global optimization problem of the chemical engineering thermodynamics. Furthermore, in order to have an initial assessment of the power of this technique, first we solve 70 test problems, and then compare the performance of the method considered here with the MIDACO solver, a powerful software recently introduced in the field of global optimization.