Synopses & Reviews
This book provides an insightful and comprehensive treatment of convexification and global optimization of continuous and mixed-integer nonlinear programs. Developed for students, researchers, and practitioners, the book covers theory, algorithms, software, and applications. This thought-provoking book: develops a powerful and widely-applicable framework for constructing closed-form expressions of convex envelopes of nonlinear functions; presents a systematic treatment of branch-and-bound, while providing acceleration mechanisms and enhancements; unifies ideas at the interface between operations research and computer science, devising efficient algorithmic implementation for global optimization; offers students, modelers, and algorithm developers a rich collection of models, applications, and numerical examples; elucidates through geometric interpretations the concepts discussed throughout the book; shows how optimization theory can lead to breakthroughs in diverse application areas, including molecular design, process and product design, facility location, and supply chain design and operation; demonstrates that the BARON software developed by the authors can solve global optimization problems heretofore considered intractable, in an entirely automated manner on a personal computer. Audience: This book will be of interest to researchers in operations research, management science, applied mathematics, computer science, computational chemistry, and all branches of engineering. In addition, the book can be used in graduate level courses in nonlinear optimization, integer programming, global optimization, convex analysis, applied mathematics, and engineering design.
Synopsis
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.
Table of Contents
Preface. Acknowledgements. List of Figures. List of Tables. 1. Introduction. 2. Convex Extensions. 3. Project Disaggregation. 4. Relaxations of Factorable Programs. 5. Domain Reduction. 6. Node Partitioning. 7. Implementation. 8. Refrigerant Design Problem. 9. The Pooling Problem. 10. Miscellaneous Problems. 11. GAMS/BARON: A Tutorial. A: GAMS Model for Pooling Problems. Bibliography. Index. Author Index.