Smoothing inertial method for worst-case robust topology optimization under load uncertainty

We consider a worst-case robust topology optimization problem under load uncertainty, which can be formulated as a minimization problem of the maximum eigenvalue of a symmetric matrix. The objective function is nondifferentiable where the multiplicity of maximum eigenvalues occurs. Nondifferentiability often causes some numerical instabilities in an optimization algorithm such as oscillation of the generated sequence and convergence to a non-optimal point. We use a smoothing method to tackle these issues. The proposed method is guaranteed to converge to a point satisfying the first-order optimality condition. In addition, it is a simple first-order optimization method and thus has low computational cost per iteration even in a large-scale problem. In numerical experiments, we show that the proposed method suppresses oscillation and converges faster than other existing methods.