Improved-Reliability Antenna Optimization Through Penalized Design Specification Scanning

Antenna engineering has become reliant on rigorous optimization methods. Although local parameter tuning is generally preferred due to manageable costs, it is often insufficient in cases where the starting point is of poor quality. The utilization of global optimization techniques is impeded by extreme computational overhead. This letter proposes a simple yet efficient approach to enable globalized search while employing local techniques. Our methodology reformulates the optimization task by evaluating antenna performance regarding the target operating bandwidths scanned within a pre-defined frequency range and applying penalties proportional to the misalignment between the original and scanned targets. This approach makes the design specifications attainable through local parameter adjustment for considerably broader frequency spectra than conventional formulation, thereby enabling globalized optimization at little extra computational expenses. Our technique is demonstrated using several antennas and showcased to operate dependably and outperform standard gradient-based algorithms dramatically.