Panos M. Pardalos

Christodoulos A. Floudas

Global Optimization has emerged as one of the most exciting new areas of mathematical programming. Global optimization has received a wide attraction from many fields in the past few years, due to the success of new algorithms for addressing previously intractable problems from diverse areas such as computational chemistry and biology, biomedicine, structural optimization, computer sciences, operations research, economics, and engineering design and control. This book contains refereed invited papers submitted at the 4th international confer ence on Frontiers in Global Optimization held at Santorini, Greece during June 8-12, 2003. Santorini is one of the few sites of Greece, with wild beauty created by the explosion of a volcano which is in the middle of the gulf of the island. The mystic landscape with its numerous mult-extrema, was an inspiring location particularly for researchers working on global optimization. The three previous conferences on "Recent Advances in Global Opti mization", "State-of-the-Art in Global Optimization", and "Optimization in Computational Chemistry and Molecular Biology: Local and Global approaches" took place at Princeton University in 1991, 1995, and 1999, respectively. The papers in this volume focus on de terministic methods for global optimization, stochastic methods for global optimization, distributed computing methods in global optimization, and applications of global optimiza tion in several branches of applied science and engineering, computer science, computational chemistry, structural biology, and bio-informatics.

Frontiers in Global Optimization

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.

Computational Methods and Applications

State of the Art in Global Optimization

1. Introduction. PART 1. FUNDAMENTALS OF CONVEX ANALYSIS AND NONLINEAR OPTIMIZATION. 2. Convex Analysis. 3. Fundamentals of Nonlinear Optimization. 4. Duality Theory. PART 2. FUNDAMENTALS OF MIXED-INTEGER OPTIMIZATION. 5. Mixed-Integer Linear Optimization. 6. Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization. PART 3. APPLICATIONS IN PROCESS SYNTHESIS. 7. Process Synthesis. 8. Heat Exchanger Network Synthesis. 9. Distillation-based Separation Systems Synthesis. 10. Synthesis of Reactor Networks and Reactor-Separator-Recycle Systems. Bibliography. Index.

Fundamentals and Applications

Nonlinear and Mixed-Integer Optimization

This book will present the papers delivered at the first U.S. conference devoted exclusively to global optimization and will thus provide valuable insights into the significant research on the topic that has been emerging during recent years. Held at Princeton University in May 1991, the conference brought together an interdisciplinary group of the most active developers of algorithms for global optimization in order to focus the attention of the mathematical programming community on the unsolved problems and diverse applications of this field. The main subjects addressed at the conference were advances in deterministic and stochastic methods for global optimization, parallel algorithms for global optimization problems, and applications of global optimization. Although global optimization is primarily a mathematical problem, it is relevant to several other disciplines, including computer science, applied mathematics, physical chemistry, molecular biology, statistics, physics, engineering, operations research, communication theory, and economics. Global optimization problems originate from a wide variety of mathematical models of real-world systems. Some of its applications are allocation and location problems and VLSI and data-base design problems. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Recent Advances in Global Optimization

Filling a void in chemical engineering and optimization literature, this book presents the theory and methods for nonlinear and mixed-integer optimization, and their applications in the important area of process synthesis. Other topics include modeling issues in process synthesis, and optimization-based approaches in the synthesis of heat recovery systems, distillation-based systems, and reactor-based systems. The basics of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization are also covered and the elementary concepts of mixed-integer linear optimization are introduced. All chapters have several illustrations and geometrical interpretations of the material as well as suggested problems. Nonlinear and Mixed-Integer Optimization will prove to be an invaluable source--either as a textbook or a reference--for researchers and graduate students interested in continuous and discrete nonlinear optimization issues in engineering design, process synthesis, process operations, applied mathematics, operations research, industrial management, and systems engineering.

The goal of the Encyclopedia of Optimization is to introduce the reader to a complete set of topics that show the spectrum of research, the richness of ideas, and the breadth of applications that has come from this field. The second edition builds on the success of the former edition with more than 150 completely new entries, designed to ensure that the reference addresses recent areas where optimization theories and techniques have advanced. Particularly heavy attention resulted in health science and transportation, with entries such as "Algorithms for Genomics", "Optimization and Radiotherapy Treatment Design", and "Crew Scheduling".

Encyclopedia of Optimization

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.

Christodoulos A. Floudas

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