Using ExternalCodeComp as the single comp and OpenMDAO concept

Question

I am very much attracted to the idea of using the OpenMDAO. However I am not sure if it is worthwhile to use OpenMDAO in an optimization scenario where I use an external code as a single component and nothing else.

Is there any difference between the implementation using an optimizer available in SciPy versus the aforementioned openmdao implementation.

Or any difference between that and implementation of similar approach in some other language like matlab optimization toolbox etc?

(Of course the way optimizers are implemented may differ but i mean conceptually am i taking advantage of OpenMDAO with this approach?)

As far as I read the articles; openMDAO is powerful in cases where multiple components ''interact'' with each other and "global derivatives"" are obtained? Am I taking advantage of openMDAO by using single ExternalCodeComp

Answer 1

Using just a single ExternalCodeComp would not be using the full potential of OpenMDAO. There would still be some advantages, because the ExternalCodeComp handles a lot of file wrapping details for you. Additionally, there are often details in an optimization, such as adding constraints, the will commonly require additional components. In that case you might use an ExecComp to add a few additional calculations. Lastly, using OpenMDAO would allow you to potentially grow your model in the future to include other disciplines.

If you are sure that you'll never do anything other than optimize the one external code, then OpenMDAO does reduce down to a similarly functionality to using the bare pyoptsparse, scipy, or matlab optimizers though. In this corner case, OpenMDAO doesn't bring a whole lot to the table, other than the ease of use of the ExternalCodeComp.