This book focuses on mathematical modeling, describes the process of constructing and evaluating models, discusses the challenges and delicacies of the modeling process, and explicitly outlines the required rules and regulations so that the reader will be able to generalize and reuse concepts in other problems by relying on mathematical logic.Undergraduate and postgraduate students of different academic disciplines would find this book a suitable option preparing them for jobs and research fields requiring modeling techniques. Furthermore, this book can be used as a reference book for experts and practitioners requiring advanced skills of model building in their jobs.

This book contains the written versions of main lectures presented at the Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on Computational Mathematical Programming, which was held in Bad Windsheim, Germany F. R., from July 23 to August 2, 1984, under the sponsorship of NATO. The ASI was organized by the Committee on Algorithms (COAL) of the Mathematical Programming Society. Co-directors were Karla Hoffmann (National Bureau of Standards, Washington, U.S.A.) and Jan Teigen (Rabobank Nederland, Zeist, The Netherlands). Ninety participants coming from about 20 different countries attended the ASI and contributed their efforts to achieve a highly interesting and stimulating meeting. Since 1947 when the first linear programming technique was developed, the importance of optimization models and their mathematical solution methods has steadily increased, and now plays a leading role in applied research areas. The basic idea of optimization theory is to minimize (or maximize) a function of several variables subject to certain restrictions. This general mathematical concept covers a broad class of possible practical applications arising in mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering, physics, economics, medicine, biology, etc. There are both industrial applications (e.g. design of mechanical structures, production plans) and applications in the natural, engineering, and social sciences (e.g. chemical equilibrium problems, christollography problems).

Civil engineering structures tend to be fabricated from materials that respond elastically at normal levels of loading. Most such materials, however, would exhibit a marked and ductile inelasticity if the structure were overloaded by accident or by some improbable but naturally occuring phenomeon. Indeed, the very presence of such ductility constitutes an important safety provision for large-scale constructions where human life is at risk. In the comprehensive evaluation of safety in structural design, it is therefore unrealistic not to consider the effects of ductility. This book sets out to show that the bringing together of the theory and methods of mathematical programming with the mathematical theory of plasticity furnishes a model which has a unifying theoretical nature and is entirely representative of observed structural behaviour. The contents of the book provide a review of the relevant aspects of mathematical programming and plasticity theory, together with a detailed presentation of the most interesting and potentially useful applications in both framed and continuum structures: ultimate strength and elastoplastic deformability; shakedown and practical upper bounds on deformation measures; evolutive dynamic response; large displacements and instability; stochastic and fuzzy programming for representing uncertainty in ultimate strength calculations. Besides providing a ready fund of computational algorithms, mathematical programming invests applications in mechanics with a refined mathematical formalism, rich in fundamental theorems, which often gives addi- tional insight into known results and occasionally lead to new ones. In addition to its obvious practical utility, the educational value of the material thoroughly befits a university discipline.