Platform · Optimization

Optimization agents

Every strong MEMS design lives on a trade-off: push sensitivity and you give up robustness to fabrication scatter. Optimization agents map that whole Pareto front while spending only a fraction of the expensive finite-element solves a direct search would burn.

01The problem

Bosch builds MEMS sensors at wafer scale, where a pressure membrane can deflect a few picometers under a small pressure change and still has to survive process scatter across thousands of dies. Its engineers frame the work plainly: multiple requirements that are hard to meet at once, so they run multi-objective optimization. The catch is that each candidate needs a full multi-physics solve, so a naive search spends thousands of runs just to draw one clean front.

infeasible (beyond front)dominated candidatesoptimizebalanced pick (knee)Pareto front · non-dominatedhigh sensitivityhigh robustnessRobustness to fabrication scatter (yield margin)Sensitivityppressure membranedeflection = sensitivity
The sensitivity versus robustness front. The trade-off a MEMS sensor design lives on, drawn here for a device like a pressure membrane of the kind Bosch and its peers build.

02How we solve it

Surrogates that learn where to solve.

Agentriq trains a probabilistic surrogate on a handful of FEA runs, then lets acquisition functions, learned policies and evolutionary search decide which candidates are worth a real solve.

ACTIVE LEARNING only high-uncertainty candidates reach the solversurrogate query ~0.01 s vs FEA solve ~22 sDOE seedspace-fillingGP surrogatemean + uncert.AcquisitionNSGA-II · EHVISelectormax uncertaintyFEA solveCOMSOLRetrainfold in resulthighest uncertaintymany cheap queries~0.01 s query~22 s solvepredictive mean +/- uncertaintyretrained surrogate returns to acquisition
The active-learning solve loop. Only high-uncertainty candidates reach the expensive solver, and every result sharpens the surrogate where it matters.

Multi-objective Bayesian optimization

A Gaussian-process surrogate models each objective with calibrated uncertainty, and expected-hypervolume-improvement picks the next design that most expands the Pareto front.

Reinforcement-learning policy search

When a design is built as a sequence of decisions, a policy learns which move to make next from the reward each candidate earns, the same family of methods now driving chip floorplanning and inverse device design.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary search

NSGA-II and NSGA-III evolve a population against the surrogate, so the front is refined in software before any expensive solver is called.

Active learning and Latin-hypercube design

Latin-hypercube sampling seeds the surrogate with broad coverage, then only high-uncertainty candidates reach full FEA and the surrogate is retrained each wave so accuracy concentrates where the decisions are close.

03What it produces

A Pareto front in fewer solves.

0.000.250.500.751.0010301003001,0003,000converged front (plateau)about 36x fewer solvesdirect: ~2,50070 solves~2.8% of FEM budgetFEM evaluations (log scale)Pareto-front hypervolumesurrogate-assisted active learningdirect NSGA-II
FEM calls to a converged front. Surrogate-guided active learning reaches a front of the same quality on a small fraction of the solver budget.

A converged sensitivity versus robustness front reached on a small fraction of the solver budget: recent MEMS optimization work hit high-quality solutions using roughly 2.8% of the FEM calls, about 70 solves instead of 2,500.

04The agentic loop

Closing the optimization loop.

Agentriq wraps the whole search in a closed agent loop that proposes candidates, verifies the promising ones against the real solver, and only writes back a front it can defend.

EVERY RESULT becomes a decisionPareto frontcandidatesVerifyre-check, convergeRoot-cause+ Agentic RAGJudgeAcceptIterateEscalateoutcome + evidence written back to structured memory
From work to a verified decision. The same propose, verify, judge, and write-back loop Agentriq runs across the platform.
  1. 01Seed a space-filling DOE, fit the Gaussian-process surrogate, and let NSGA-II with expected-hypervolume-improvement propose the next candidate batch.
  2. 02Verify the most promising candidates with a full multi-physics FEA solve and fold the true results back into the surrogate.
  3. 03When a candidate misses target or the surrogate and solver disagree, trace the root cause and pull method and prior-design context through Agentic RAG.
  4. 04A judge scores the refined Pareto front against the sensitivity and robustness targets and decides accept, iterate, or escalate.
  5. 05Write the accepted front, the winning designs, and their full provenance back to the record.

05Tooling

Simulation, solvers & frameworks.

  • BoTorch
  • Ax
  • pymoo
  • scikit-optimize
  • GPyTorch
  • RLlib
  • COMSOL Multiphysics
  • Ansys
  • Ansys SimAI
  • Neural Concept

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