Optimization strategies for efficient antenna design

The conventional procedures for the design of antenna systems often yield a solution that is sub-optimal: this occurs especially when the configuration to be designed is complex, as could be a multi-beam antenna, since many parameters have to be managed and several goals, sometimes competing each other, have to be achieved or when the antenna constraints are not known “a priori” but could be just estimated during the optimization process itself. A possible solution to overcome these limitations consists in using a global optimizer. Here, several different approaches are considered and compared in terms of their performances when applied to different classes of problems.