Many engineering, operations, and scientific applications include a
mixture of discrete and continuous decision variables and nonlinear
relationships involving the decision variables that have a pronounced
effect on the set of feasible and optimal solutions. Mixed-integer
nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems combine the numerical
difficulties of handling nonlinear functions with the challenge of
optimizing in the context of nonconvex functions and discrete variables.
MINLP is one of the most flexible modeling paradigms available for
optimization; but because its scope is so broad, in the most general
cases it is hopelessly intractable. Nonetheless, an expanding body of
researchers and practitioners -- including chemical engineers,
operations researchers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers,
economists, statisticians, computer scientists, operations managers, and
mathematical programmers -- are interested in solving large-scale MINLP
instances.