Introduction

OPTI 2012 is the 12th in the series of international conferences devoted to Optimum Design of Structures and Materials.

The main objective of this event is to provide a friendly and useful forum for the interchange of ideas and initiatives amongst researchers, designers and scholars in the optimization community to share advances in design optimization. The OPTI conferences started in Southampton, UK,(1989) followed by Boston, USA (1991); Zaragoza, Spain (1993); Miami, USA (1995); Rome, Italy (1997); Orlando, USA (1999); Bologna, Italy (2001); Detroit, USA (2003); Skiathos, Greece (2005); Myrtle Beach, USA (2007) and the Algarve, Portugal (2009).

The conference aims to attract papers describing case studies in engineering; considering static, dynamic analysis and damage tolerance. Manufacturing and structural protection issues will be discussed as well as papers on emergent applications in fields such as biomechanics. Contributions on numerical methods and different optimization techniques are also welcome, as well as papers on new software. Optimization problems of interest to the meeting involve those related to size, shape and topology or material properties.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that optimization techniques have much to offer to those involved in the design of new industrial products. The formulation of optimum design has evolved from the time it was purely an academic topic, unable now to satisfy the requirements of real life prototypes. The development of new algorithms, the improvement of others, the appearance of powerful commercial computer codes with easy to use graphical interfaces and the revolution in the speed of computers has created a fertile field for the incorporation of optimization in the design process in different engineering disciplines.