The overall performance of an electron storage ring is critically dependant on a large number of variables. It can be characterised in many ways, such as by lifetime, injection efficiency, beam stability and so on. It is frequently the case however that improving one parameter comes at the cost of harming another. Equally, given the large number of variables involved in optimising the ring performance, the true, global optimum solution may be difficult to identify using simple parameter scans.

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... n order to address this problem, a flexible optimisation tool has been developed. This tool is capable of optimising several parameters at once and can cope with an arbitrary number of variables (individually or in families). The tool is designed to be robust to measurement noise, and has been applied to a number of different optimisation problems. This paper presents an overview of the package, as well as the results of the first tests.