Design optimization is an engineering design methodology using a mathematical formulation of a design problem to support selection of the optimal design among many alternatives. Design optimization involves the following stages:

The formal mathematical (standard form) statement of the design optimization problem is

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&{\operatorname {minimize} }&&f(x)\\&\operatorname {subject\;to} &&h_{i}(x)=0,\quad i=1,\dots ,m_{1}\\&&&g_{j}(x)\leq 0,\quad j=1,\dots ,m_{2}\\&\operatorname {and} &&x\in X\subseteq R^{n}\end{aligned}}}$

where

The problem formulation stated above is a convention called the negative null form, since all constraint function are expressed as equalities and negative inequalities with zero on the right-hand side. This convention is used so that numerical algorithms developed to solve design optimization problems can assume a standard expression of the mathematical problem.

We can introduce the vector-valued functions

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&&&{h=(h_{1},h_{2},\dots ,h_{m1})}\\\operatorname {and} \\&&&{g=(g_{1},g_{2},\dots ,g_{m2})}\end{aligned}}}$

to rewrite the above statement in the compact expression