Global and mid-range approximation concepts are used in engineering optimisation in those cases were the commonly used local approximations are not available or applicable. In this paper the response surface method is discussed as a method to build both global and mid-range approximations of the...

This paper is concerned with the analysis and comparison of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the satisfiability (SAT) problem. Our presentation is focussed on the special case of 3-SAT, but the ideas presented can in principle be extended to any instance of SAT specified by a set...

Effective risk management requires adequate risk measurement. A basic problem herein is the quantification of market risks: what is the overall effect on a portfolio if market rates change? First, a mathematical problem statement is given and the concept of `Maximum Loss' (ML) is introduced as a...

The problem of multidimensional scaling with city-block distances in the embedding space is reduced to a two level optimization problem consisting of a combinatorial problem at the upper level and a quadratic programming problem at the lower level. A hybrid method is proposed combining...

When dealing with location problems we are usually given a set of existing facilities and we are looking for the location of one or several new facilities. In the classical approaches weights are assigned to existing facilities expressing the importance of the new facilities for the existing...

In this paper simulated annealing algorithms for continuous global optimization are considered.Under the simplifying assumption of known optimal value, the convergence of the algorithms and an upper bound for the expected first hitting time, i.e. the expected number of iterations before reaching...

The “Montagnes Russes” algorithm for finding the global minima of a lower semi-continuous function (thus involving state constraints) is a descent algorithm applied to an auxiliary function whose local and global minima are the global minima of the original function. Although this auxiliary...