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.