Software Packages for Optimization Problems

The universe is full of problems which need to find out the maxima and
minima of lines, surfaces or multidimensional entities - we always need
to know the least difficult, the most profitable or the fastest possible
way of arriving at a solution.

You are given some functions of some variables and some constraints
on those variables and, may be, some explicit data and your job is to
find out the optimum solution. We guess professional people in all areas
of Science, Engineering and management encounter such problems
very frequently in their lifetime.

No single optimization software package can solve all optimization
problems. The space that the problem covers could be vast, littered
with discontinuities and noisy. For solving complex problems, you may
need to try searching the space with very good resolution, which may
not be possible in a reasonable time on a reasonable computer. The
inherent correlation among variables may easily lead to degeneracy of
possible solutions.

In near future we will introduce the following two widely used
Optimization packages: Mathematica's "Math Optimizer" add-on
package and Matlab's Optimization toolbox, "Global Optimizer".

Interested readers may also refer to the following widely-acclaimed
books on optimization methods:
"Global Optimization in Action" - J.D. Pinter (Kluwer, 1996)
"Global Optimization using Interval Analysis" - Eldon Hansen,
G. William Walster (Marcel Dekkar, 2003)
"Computational Global Optimization in Nonlinear Systems"
- J. D. Pinter (Lionhart Pub., 2001)