Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein, Readers Digest, 1977) The modern practice of creating technical systems and technological processes of high effi.ciency besides the employment of new principles, new materials, new physical effects and other new solutions ( which is very traditional and plays the key role in the selection of the general structure of the object to be designed) also includes the choice of the best combination for the set of parameters (geometrical sizes, electrical and strength characteristics, etc.) concretizing this general structure, because the Variation of these parameters ( with the structure or linkage being already set defined) can essentially affect the objective performance indexes. The mathematical tools for choosing these best combinations are exactly what is this book about. With the advent of computers and the computer-aided design the pro bations of the selected variants are usually performed not for the real examples ( this may require some very expensive building of sample op tions and of the special installations to test them ), but by the analysis of the corresponding mathematical models. The sophistication of the mathematical models for the objects to be designed, which is the natu ral consequence of the raising complexity of these objects, greatly com plicates the objective performance analysis. Today, the main (and very often the only) available instrument for such an analysis is computer aided simulation of an object's behavior, based on numerical experiments with its mathematical model.

This book provides a unified and insightful treatment of deterministic global optimization. It introduces theoretical and algorithmic advances that address the computation and characterization of global optima, determine valid lower and upper bounds on the global minima and maxima, and enclose all solutions of nonlinear constrained systems of equations. Among its special features, the book: Introduces the fundamentals of deterministic global optimization; Provides a thorough treatment of decomposition-based global optimization approaches for biconvex and bilinear problems; Covers global optimization methods for generalized geometric programming problems Presents in-depth global optimization algorithms for general twice continuously differentiable nonlinear problems; Provides a detailed treatment of global optimization methods for mixed-integer nonlinear problems; Develops global optimization approaches for the enclosure of all solutions of nonlinear constrained systems of equations; Includes many important applications from process design, synthesis, control, and operations, phase equilibrium, design under uncertainty, parameter estimation, azeotrope prediction, structure prediction in clusters and molecules, protein folding, and peptide docking. Audience: This book can be used as a textbook in graduate-level courses and as a desk reference for researchers in all branches of engineering and applied science, applied mathematics, industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, computational chemistry and molecular biology.

Optimization problems abound in most fields of science, engineering, and tech nology. In many of these problems it is necessary to compute the global optimum (or a good approximation) of a multivariable function. The variables that define the function to be optimized can be continuous and/or discrete and, in addition, many times satisfy certain constraints. Global optimization problems belong to the complexity class of NP-hard prob lems. Such problems are very difficult to solve. Traditional descent optimization algorithms based on local information are not adequate for solving these problems. In most cases of practical interest the number of local optima increases, on the aver age, exponentially with the size of the problem (number of variables). Furthermore, most of the traditional approaches fail to escape from a local optimum in order to continue the search for the global solution. Global optimization has received a lot of attention in the past ten years, due to the success of new algorithms for solving large classes of problems from diverse areas such as engineering design and control, computational chemistry and biology, structural optimization, computer science, operations research, and economics. This book contains refereed invited papers presented at the conference on "State of the Art in Global Optimization: Computational Methods and Applications" held at Princeton University, April 28-30, 1995. The conference presented current re search on global optimization and related applications in science and engineering. The papers included in this book cover a wide spectrum of approaches for solving global optimization problems and applications.

Significant research activity has occurred in the area of global optimization in recent years. Many new theoretical, algorithmic, and computational contributions have resulted. Despite the major importance of test problems for researchers, there has been a lack of representative nonconvex test problems for constrained global optimization algorithms. This book is motivated by the scarcity of global optimization test problems and represents the first systematic collection of test problems for evaluating and testing constrained global optimization algorithms. This collection includes problems arising in a variety of engineering applications, and test problems from published computational reports.

Interest in constrained optimization originated with the simple linear pro gramming model since it was practical and perhaps the only computationally tractable model at the time. Constrained linear optimization models were soon adopted in numerous application areas and are perhaps the most widely used mathematical models in operations research and management science at the time of this writing. Modelers have, however, found the assumption of linearity to be overly restrictive in expressing the real-world phenomena and problems in economics, finance, business, communication, engineering design, computational biology, and other areas that frequently demand the use of nonlinear expressions and discrete variables in optimization models. Both of these extensions of the linear programming model are NP-hard, thus representing very challenging problems. On the brighter side, recent advances in algorithmic and computing technology make it possible to re visit these problems with the hope of solving practically relevant problems in reasonable amounts of computational time. Initial attempts at solving nonlinear programs concentrated on the de velopment of local optimization methods guaranteeing globality under the assumption of convexity. On the other hand, the integer programming liter ature has concentrated on the development of methods that ensure global optima. The aim of this book is to marry the advancements in solving nonlinear and integer programming models and to develop new results in the more general framework of mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MINLPs) with the goal of devising practically efficient global optimization algorithms for MINLPs.

Global optimization is concerned with the characterization and computation of global minima or maxima of nonlinear functions. Such problems are widespread in mathematical modeling of real world systems for a very broad range of applications. The applications include economies of scale, fixed charges, allocation and location problems, quadratic assignment and a number of other combinatorial optimization problems. More recently it has been shown that certain aspects of VLSI chip design and database problems can be formulated as constrained global optimization problems with a quadratic objective function. Although standard nonlinear programming algorithms will usually obtain a local minimum to the problem , such a local minimum will only be global when certain conditions are satisfied (such as f and K being convex).