Advances In Stochastic And Deterministic Global Optimization

Current research results in stochastic and deterministic global optimization including single and multiple objectives are explored and presented in this book by leading specialists from various fields. Contributions include applications to multidimensional data visualization, regression, survey calibration, inventory management, timetabling, chemical engineering, energy systems, and competitive facility location. Graduate students, researchers, and scientists in computer science, numerical analysis, optimization, and applied mathematics will be fascinated by the theoretical, computational, and application-oriented aspects of stochastic and deterministic global optimization explored in this book. This volume is dedicated to the 70th birthday of Antanas Žilinskas who is a leading world expert in global optimization. Professor Žilinskas's research has concentrated on studying models for the objective function, the development and implementation of efficient algorithms for global optimization with single and multiple objectives, and application of algorithms for solving real-world practical problems.

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.

This book examines the main methodological and theoretical developments in stochastic global optimization. It is designed to inspire readers to explore various stochastic methods of global optimization by clearly explaining the main methodological principles and features of the methods. Among the book’s features is a comprehensive study of probabilistic and statistical models underlying the stochastic optimization algorithms.

This book is dedicated to the 70th birthday of Professor J. Mockus, whose scientific interests include theory and applications of global and discrete optimization, and stochastic programming. The papers for the book were selected because they relate to these topics and also satisfy the criterion of theoretical soundness combined with practical applicability. In addition, the methods for statistical analysis of extremal problems are covered. Although statistical approach to global and discrete optimization is emphasized, applications to optimal design and to mathematical finance are also presented. The results of some subjects (e.g., statistical models based on one-dimensional global optimization) are summarized and the prospects for new developments are justified. Audience: Practitioners, graduate students in mathematics, statistics, computer science and engineering.

The vast majority of important applications in science, engineering and applied science are characterized by the existence of multiple minima and maxima, as well as first, second and higher order saddle points. The area of Deterministic Global Optimization introduces theoretical, algorithmic and computational ad vances that (i) address the computation and characterization of global minima and maxima, (ii) determine valid lower and upper bounds on the global minima and maxima, and (iii) address the enclosure of all solutions of nonlinear con strained systems of equations. Global optimization applications are widespread in all disciplines and they range from atomistic or molecular level to process and product level representations. The primary goal of this book is three fold : first, to introduce the reader to the basics of deterministic global optimization; second, to present important theoretical and algorithmic advances for several classes of mathematical prob lems that include biconvex and bilinear; problems, signomial problems, general twice differentiable nonlinear problems, mixed integer nonlinear problems, and the enclosure of all solutions of nonlinear constrained systems of equations; and third, to tie the theory and methods together with a variety of important applications.

This book begins with a concentrated introduction into deterministic global optimization and moves forward to present new original results from the authors who are well known experts in the field. Multiextremal continuous problems that have an unknown structure with Lipschitz objective functions and functions having the first Lipschitz derivatives defined over hyperintervals are examined. A class of algorithms using several Lipschitz constants is introduced which has its origins in the DIRECT (DIviding RECTangles) method. This new class is based on an efficient strategy that is applied for the search domain partitioning. In addition a survey on derivative free methods and methods using the first derivatives is given for both one-dimensional and multi-dimensional cases. Non-smooth and smooth minorants and acceleration techniques that can speed up several classes of global optimization methods with examples of applications and problems arising in numerical testing of global optimization algorithms are discussed. Theoretical considerations are illustrated through engineering applications. Extensive numerical testing of algorithms described in this book stretches the likelihood of establishing a link between mathematicians and practitioners. The authors conclude by describing applications and a generator of random classes of test functions with known local and global minima that is used in more than 40 countries of the world. This title serves as a starting point for students, researchers, engineers, and other professionals in operations research, management science, computer science, engineering, economics, environmental sciences, industrial and applied mathematics to obtain an overview of deterministic global optimization.

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.

In 1995 the Handbook of Global Optimization (first volume), edited by R. Horst, and P.M. Pardalos, was published. This second volume of the Handbook of Global Optimization is comprised of chapters dealing with modern approaches to global optimization, including different types of heuristics. Topics covered in the handbook include various metaheuristics, such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, neural networks, taboo search, shake-and-bake methods, and deformation methods. In addition, the book contains chapters on new exact stochastic and deterministic approaches to continuous and mixed-integer global optimization, such as stochastic adaptive search, two-phase methods, branch-and-bound methods with new relaxation and branching strategies, algorithms based on local optimization, and dynamical search. Finally, the book contains chapters on experimental analysis of algorithms and software, test problems, and applications.