EFCOSS: An interactive environment facilitating optimal experimental design

An interactive software environment is proposed that combines numerical simulation codes with optimization software packages in an automated and modular way. It simplifies the experimentation with varying objective functions for common optimization problems such as parameter estimation and optimal experimental design that are frequently encountered in computational science and engineering. The design philosophy takes into consideration the need for derivatives of potentially large-scale simulation codes via automatic differentiation as well as distributed computing in a heterogenous environment via CORBA.