Recent Advances and Trends in Global Optimization: Deterministic and Stochastic Methods

Global optimization has been expanding in all directions at an astonishing rate during the last few decades. Many new theoretical, algorithmic, and computational contributions of global optimization have been used to solve a wide spectrum of difficult problems in science and engineering. In particular, global optimization has recently emerged as a successful and versatile tool in many aspects of product and process design problems. The first part of the paper covers material regarding deterministic global optimization. We are going to focus on new algorithmic developments and some applications. In the second part of the paper we will outline some of the most basic stochastic techniques for global optimization and will present some elementary yet powerful approaches which might prove very useful for applications in the fields of process design, of innovative material research and of problems of biological interest; these problems share an enormous complexity which in most cases can be attacked only through heuristic methods.