Panos M. Pardalos

For students in industrial and systems engineering (ISE) and operations research (OR) to understand optimization at an advanced level, they must first grasp the analysis of algorithms, computational complexity, and other concepts and modern developments in numerical methods. Satisfying this prerequisite, Numerical Methods and Optimization: An Introduction combines the materials from introductory numerical methods and introductory optimization courses into a single text. This classroom-tested approach enriches a standard numerical methods syllabus with optional chapters on numerical optimization and provides a valuable numerical methods background for students taking an introductory OR or optimization course.The first part of the text introduces the necessary mathematical background, the digital representation of numbers, and different types of errors associated with numerical methods. The second part explains how to solve typical problems using numerical methods. Focusing on optimization methods, the final part presents basic theory and algorithms for linear and nonlinear optimization.The book assumes minimal prior knowledge of the topics. Taking a rigorous yet accessible approach to the material, it includes some mathematical proofs as samples of rigorous analysis but in most cases, uses only examples to illustrate the concepts. While the authors provide a MATLAB® guide and code available for download, the book can be used with other software packages.

Before the appearance of broadband links and wireless systems, networks have been used to connect people in new ways. Now, the modern world is connected through large-scale, computational networked systems such as the Internet. Because of the ever-advancing technology of networking, efficient algorithms have become increasingly necessary to solve some of the problems developing in this area."Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" focuses on computational issues arising from the process of optimizing network routes, such as quality of the resulting links and their reliability. Algorithms are a cornerstone for the understanding of the protocols underlying multicast routing. The main objective in the text is to derive efficient algorithms, with or without guarantee of approximation. Notes have been provided for basic topics such as graph theory and linear programming to assist those who are not fully acquainted with the mathematical topics presented throughout the book."Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" provides a thorough introduction to the subject of algorithms for network routing, and focuses especially on multicast and wireless ad hoc systems. This book is designed for graduate students, researchers, and professionals interested in understanding the algorithmic and mathematical ideas behind routing in computer networks. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in the area of network algorithms.

Optimization Approaches for Solving String Selection Problems provides an overview of optimization methods for a wide class of genomics-related problems in relation to the string selection problems. This class of problems addresses the recognition of similar characteristics or differences within biological sequences. Specifically, this book considers a large class of problems, ranging from the closest string and substring problems, to the farthest string and substring problems, to the far from most string problem. Each problem includes a detailed description, highlighting both biological and mathematical features and presents state-of-the-art approaches.This Brief provides a quick introduction of optimization methods for string selection problems for young scientists and a detailed description of the mathematical and computational methods developed for experts in the field of optimization who want to deepen their understanding of the string selection problems. Researchers, practitioners and graduate students in the field of Computer Science, Operation Research, Mathematics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine will find this book useful. ?

Data uncertainty is a concept closely related with most real life applications that involve data collection and interpretation. Examples can be found in data acquired with biomedical instruments or other experimental techniques. Integration of robust optimization in the existing data mining techniques aim to create new algorithms resilient to error and noise.This work encapsulates all the latest applications of robust optimization in data mining. This brief contains an overview of the rapidly growing field of robust data mining research field and presents the most well known machine learning algorithms, their robust counterpart formulations and algorithms for attacking these problems. This brief will appeal to theoreticians and data miners working in this field.

Data Mining in Agriculture represents a comprehensive effort to provide graduate students and researchers with an analytical text on data mining techniques applied to agriculture and environmental related fields. This book presents both theoretical and practical insights with a focus on presenting the context of each data mining technique rather intuitively with ample concrete examples represented graphically and with algorithms written in Matlab®. Examples and exercises with solutions are provided at the end of each chapter to facilitate the comprehension of the material. For each data mining technique described in the book variants and improvements of the basic algorithm are also given.

Before the appearance of broadband links and wireless systems, networks have been used to connect people in new ways. Now, the modern world is connected through large-scale, computational networked systems such as the Internet. Because of the ever-advancing technology of networking, efficient algorithms have become increasingly necessary to solve some of the problems developing in this area."Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" focuses on computational issues arising from the process of optimizing network routes, such as quality of the resulting links and their reliability. Algorithms are a cornerstone for the understanding of the protocols underlying multicast routing. The main objective in the text is to derive efficient algorithms, with or without guarantee of approximation. Notes have been provided for basic topics such as graph theory and linear programming to assist those who are not fully acquainted with the mathematical topics presented throughout the book."Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" provides a thorough introduction to the subject of algorithms for network routing, and focuses especially on multicast and wireless ad hoc systems. This book is designed for graduate students, researchers, and professionals interested in understanding the algorithmic and mathematical ideas behind routing in computer networks. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in the area of network algorithms.

February 27 - March 1, 1997, the conference Optimal Control: The­ ory, Algorithms, and Applications took place at the University of Florida, hosted by the Center for Applied Optimization. The conference brought together researchers from universities, industry, and government laborato­ ries in the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Sweden. There were forty-five invited talks, including seven talks by students. The conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and endorsed by the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory, the Mathe­ matical Programming Society, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS). Since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s, Optimal Control has been closely connected to industrial applications, starting with aerospace. The program for the Gainesville conference, which reflected the rich cross-disci­ plinary flavor of the field, included aerospace applications as well as both novel and emerging applications to superconductors, diffractive optics, non­ linear optics, structural analysis, bioreactors, corrosion detection, acoustic flow, process design in chemical engineering, hydroelectric power plants, sterilization of canned foods, robotics, and thermoelastic plates and shells. The three days of the conference were organized around the three confer­ ence themes, theory, algorithms, and applications. This book is a collection of the papers presented at the Gainesville conference. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the sponsors and participants of the conference, the authors, the referees, and the publisher for making this volume possible.

The present book is based on results of scienti?c investigations and on the materials of special courses, o?ered for graduate and undergraduate students. The purpose of this book is to acquaint the reader with the developments in bilinear systems theory and its applications. Particular attention is paid to control of open physical processes functioning in a nonequilibrium mode. The text consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 is concerned with the problems of systems analysis of bilinear processes. Chapter 2 solves the problem of optimal control of bilinear systems on the basis of di?er- tial geometry methods. Chapter 3 deals with the progress made in an adaptive estimation technique. Chapter 4 is devoted to the application of the Yang–Mills ?elds to investigation of nonlinear control problems. Chapter 5 considers intelligent sensors, used to examine weak signals. This chapter also describes and analyzes bilinear models of intelligent sensing elements. Chapter 6 illustrates control problems of a quantum system. Chapter 7 discusses the problems of control and identi?cation in systems with chaotic dynamics. Finally, Chapter 8 examines the c- trolled processes running in biomolecular systems. This book is directed to students, postgraduate students, and speci- ists engaged in the ?elds of control of physical processes, quantum and molecular computing, biophysics, and physical information science.

Significant research activities have taken place in the areas of local and global optimization in the last two decades. Many new theoretical, computational, algorithmic, and software contributions have resulted. It has been realized that despite these numerous contributions, there does not exist a systematic forum for thorough experimental computational testing and· evaluation of the proposed optimization algorithms and their implementations. Well-designed nonconvex optimization test problems are of major impor­ tance for academic and industrial researchers interested in algorithmic and software development. It is remarkable that eventhough nonconvex models dominate all the important application areas in engineering and applied sci­ ences, there is only a limited dass of reported representative test problems. This book reflects our long term efforts in designing a benchmark database and it is motivated primarily from the need for nonconvex optimization test problems. The present collection of benchmarks indudes test problems from literature studies and a large dass of applications that arise in several branches of engineering and applied science.

This book provides a new point of view on the subject of the management of uncertainty. It covers a wide variety of both theoretical and practical issues involving the analysis and management of uncertainty in the fields of finance, management and marketing. Audience: Researchers and professionals from operations research, management science and economics.

Optimization is of central importance in all sciences. Nature inherently seeks optimal solutions. For example, light travels through the "shortest" path and the folded state of a protein corresponds to the structure with the "minimum" potential energy. In combinatorial optimization, there are numerous computationally hard problems arising in real world applications, such as floorplanning in VLSI designs and Steiner trees in communication networks. For these problems, the exact optimal solution is not currently real-time computable. One usually computes an approximate solution with various kinds of heuristics. Recently, many approaches have been developed that link the discrete space of combinatorial optimization to the continuous space of nonlinear optimization through geometric, analytic, and algebraic techniques. Many researchers have found that such approaches lead to very fast and efficient heuristics for solving large problems. Although almost all such heuristics work well in practice there is no solid theoretical analysis, except Karmakar's algorithm for linear programming. With this situation in mind, we decided to teach a seminar on nonlinear optimization with emphasis on its mathematical foundations. This book is the result of that seminar. During the last decades many textbooks and monographs in nonlinear optimization have been published. Why should we write this new one? What is the difference of this book from the others? The motivation for writing this book originated from our efforts to select a textbook for a graduate seminar with focus on the mathematical foundations of optimization.

Software Engineering Techniques Applied to Agricultural Systems presents cutting-edge software engineering techniques for designing and implementing better agricultural software systems based on the object-oriented paradigm and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The book is divided in two parts: the first part presents concepts of the object-oriented paradigm and the UML notation of these concepts, and the second part provides a number of examples of applications that use the material presented in the first part. The examples presented illustrate the techniques discussed, focusing on how to construct better models using objects and UML diagrams. More advanced concepts such as distributed systems and examples of how to build these systems are presented in the last chapter of the book. The book presents a step-by-step approach for modeling agricultural systems, starting with a conceptual diagram representing elements of the system and their relationships. Furthermore, diagrams such as sequential and collaboration diagrams are used to explain the dynamic and static aspects of the software system.

Data Mining in Agriculture represents a comprehensive effort to provide graduate students and researchers with an analytical text on data mining techniques applied to agriculture and environmental related fields. This book presents both theoretical and practical insights with a focus on presenting the context of each data mining technique rather intuitively with ample concrete examples represented graphically and with algorithms written in Matlab®. Examples and exercises with solutions are provided at the end of each chapter to facilitate the comprehension of the material. For each data mining technique described in the book variants and improvements of the basic algorithm are also given.

The present book is based on results of scienti?c investigations and on the materials of special courses, o?ered for graduate and undergraduate students. The purpose of this book is to acquaint the reader with the developments in bilinear systems theory and its applications. Particular attention is paid to control of open physical processes functioning in a nonequilibrium mode. The text consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 is concerned with the problems of systems analysis of bilinear processes. Chapter 2 solves the problem of optimal control of bilinear systems on the basis of di?er- tial geometry methods. Chapter 3 deals with the progress made in an adaptive estimation technique. Chapter 4 is devoted to the application of the Yang–Mills ?elds to investigation of nonlinear control problems. Chapter 5 considers intelligent sensors, used to examine weak signals. This chapter also describes and analyzes bilinear models of intelligent sensing elements. Chapter 6 illustrates control problems of a quantum system. Chapter 7 discusses the problems of control and identi?cation in systems with chaotic dynamics. Finally, Chapter 8 examines the c- trolled processes running in biomolecular systems. This book is directed to students, postgraduate students, and speci- ists engaged in the ?elds of control of physical processes, quantum and molecular computing, biophysics, and physical information science.

Optimization is of central importance in all sciences. Nature inherently seeks optimal solutions. For example, light travels through the "shortest" path and the folded state of a protein corresponds to the structure with the "minimum" potential energy. In combinatorial optimization, there are numerous computationally hard problems arising in real world applications, such as floorplanning in VLSI designs and Steiner trees in communication networks. For these problems, the exact optimal solution is not currently real-time computable. One usually computes an approximate solution with various kinds of heuristics. Recently, many approaches have been developed that link the discrete space of combinatorial optimization to the continuous space of nonlinear optimization through geometric, analytic, and algebraic techniques. Many researchers have found that such approaches lead to very fast and efficient heuristics for solving large problems. Although almost all such heuristics work well in practice there is no solid theoretical analysis, except Karmakar's algorithm for linear programming. With this situation in mind, we decided to teach a seminar on nonlinear optimization with emphasis on its mathematical foundations. This book is the result of that seminar. During the last decades many textbooks and monographs in nonlinear optimization have been published. Why should we write this new one? What is the difference of this book from the others? The motivation for writing this book originated from our efforts to select a textbook for a graduate seminar with focus on the mathematical foundations of optimization.

In this edition, the scope and character of the monograph did not change with respect to the first edition. Taking into account the rapid development of the field, we have, however, considerably enlarged its contents. Chapter 4 includes two additional sections 4.4 and 4.6 on theory and algorithms of D.C. Programming. Chapter 7, on Decomposition Algorithms in Nonconvex Optimization, is completely new. Besides this, we added several exercises and corrected errors and misprints in the first edition. We are grateful for valuable suggestions and comments that we received from several colleagues. R. Horst, P.M. Pardalos and N.V. Thoai March 2000 Preface to the First Edition Many recent advances in science, economics and engineering rely on nu­ merical techniques for computing globally optimal solutions to corresponding optimization problems. Global optimization problems are extraordinarily di­ verse and they include economic modeling, fixed charges, finance, networks and transportation, databases and chip design, image processing, nuclear and mechanical design, chemical engineering design and control, molecular biology, and environment al engineering. Due to the existence of multiple local optima that differ from the global solution all these problems cannot be solved by classical nonlinear programming techniques. During the past three decades, however, many new theoretical, algorith­ mic, and computational contributions have helped to solve globally multi­ extreme problems arising from important practical applications.

In this edition, the scope and character of the monograph did not change with respect to the first edition. Taking into account the rapid development of the field, we have, however, considerably enlarged its contents. Chapter 4 includes two additional sections 4.4 and 4.6 on theory and algorithms of D.C. Programming. Chapter 7, on Decomposition Algorithms in Nonconvex Optimization, is completely new. Besides this, we added several exercises and corrected errors and misprints in the first edition. We are grateful for valuable suggestions and comments that we received from several colleagues. R. Horst, P.M. Pardalos and N.V. Thoai March 2000 Preface to the First Edition Many recent advances in science, economics and engineering rely on nu­ merical techniques for computing globally optimal solutions to corresponding optimization problems. Global optimization problems are extraordinarily di­ verse and they include economic modeling, fixed charges, finance, networks and transportation, databases and chip design, image processing, nuclear and mechanical design, chemical engineering design and control, molecular biology, and environment al engineering. Due to the existence of multiple local optima that differ from the global solution all these problems cannot be solved by classical nonlinear programming techniques. During the past three decades, however, many new theoretical, algorith­ mic, and computational contributions have helped to solve globally multi­ extreme problems arising from important practical applications.

Significant research activities have taken place in the areas of local and global optimization in the last two decades. Many new theoretical, computational, algorithmic, and software contributions have resulted. It has been realized that despite these numerous contributions, there does not exist a systematic forum for thorough experimental computational testing and· evaluation of the proposed optimization algorithms and their implementations. Well-designed nonconvex optimization test problems are of major impor­ tance for academic and industrial researchers interested in algorithmic and software development. It is remarkable that eventhough nonconvex models dominate all the important application areas in engineering and applied sci­ ences, there is only a limited dass of reported representative test problems. This book reflects our long term efforts in designing a benchmark database and it is motivated primarily from the need for nonconvex optimization test problems. The present collection of benchmarks indudes test problems from literature studies and a large dass of applications that arise in several branches of engineering and applied science.

This book provides a new point of view on the subject of the management of uncertainty. It covers a wide variety of both theoretical and practical issues involving the analysis and management of uncertainty in the fields of finance, management and marketing. Audience: Researchers and professionals from operations research, management science and economics.

February 27 - March 1, 1997, the conference Optimal Control: The­ ory, Algorithms, and Applications took place at the University of Florida, hosted by the Center for Applied Optimization. The conference brought together researchers from universities, industry, and government laborato­ ries in the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Sweden. There were forty-five invited talks, including seven talks by students. The conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and endorsed by the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory, the Mathe­ matical Programming Society, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS). Since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s, Optimal Control has been closely connected to industrial applications, starting with aerospace. The program for the Gainesville conference, which reflected the rich cross-disci­ plinary flavor of the field, included aerospace applications as well as both novel and emerging applications to superconductors, diffractive optics, non­ linear optics, structural analysis, bioreactors, corrosion detection, acoustic flow, process design in chemical engineering, hydroelectric power plants, sterilization of canned foods, robotics, and thermoelastic plates and shells. The three days of the conference were organized around the three confer­ ence themes, theory, algorithms, and applications. This book is a collection of the papers presented at the Gainesville conference. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the sponsors and participants of the conference, the authors, the referees, and the publisher for making this volume possible.