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.