FMINCON Lab/HW Idea Engineering Models II

Purpose:
The purpose of this lab would be to teach students an additional capability of MATLAB. At this
point in their programming education they have learned how to write code in MATLAB to solve
simple problems. fmincon is a very useful tool that is used for optimization problems that may
be too advanced for their symbolic toolbox capabilities. Many students encounter optimization
problems on their first co-op. I know that fmincon would have helped me for my first co-op.

Format:
A lab/HW that would teach this function of MATLAB would first have to require the students to
use the symbolic toolbox to solve a few simple and slightly complex optimization problems. The
first few could be from calculus one and have no constraints. Then a few could be from
multivariable calculus and require partial derivatives. The last two problems could be extremely
complex and this is where fmincon would come in handy. They would have to be real life
problems so the students could understand the usefulness of the function.

The students would submit the code that they wrote to solve the problems requiring the symbolic
toolbox and screenshots of the data they entered into the fmincon function to solve the last two
problems.

Conclusion:
There are three main goals for a lab like this. The first is to give students a useful optimization
tool that they may be able to use during a co-op in manufacturing, process, or design
engineering. The second goal is to display another feature of MATLAB that many students
didnt know existed. Most students think that what they learn in the first two semesters of
Models is all the program can do but it is much more powerful than they will ever know unless
they are a CS major. The third reason this lab is important is because it is a good practice for the
symbolic toolbox, which is a very useful tool in itself.