  For many technological applications of superconductors the performance of a
material is determined by the highest current it can carry losslessly - the
critical current. In turn, the critical current can be controlled by adding
non-superconducting defects in the superconductor matrix. Here we report on
systematic comparison of different local and global optimization strategies to
predict optimal structures of pinning centers leading to the highest possible
critical currents. We demonstrate performance of these methods for a
superconductor with randomly placed spherical, elliptical, and columnar
defects.
