Preface The interface between computer science and operations research has drawn much attention recently especially in optimization which is a main tool in operations research. In optimization area, the interest on this interface has rapidly increased in the last few years in order to develop nonstandard algorithms that can deal with optimization problems which the standard optimization techniq...

In the free-energy landscape picture of glassy systems, their slow dynamics is due to a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show that for a colloidal glassy material multiple paths can be taken through the free-energy landscape. The evolution of the nonergodicity parameter shows two distinct master curves that we identify as gels and glasses. We show that for a range of...

Nowadays, in majority of academic contexts, it has been tried to consider the highest possible level of similarities to the real world. Hence, most of the problems have complicated structures. Traditional methods for solving almost all of the mathematical and optimization problems are inefficient. As a result, meta-heuristic algorithms have been employed increasingly during recent years. In thi...

Finding multiple local minima in the merit function landscape of optical system optimization is a difficult task, especially for complex designs that have a large number of variables. We discuss here a method that enables a rapid generation of new local minima for optical systems of arbitrary complexity. We have recently shown that saddle points known in mathematics as Morse index 1 saddle poin...

This paper introduces a modified particle swarm optimizer (PSO) called the Multi-Species Particle Swarm Optimizer (MSPSO) for locating all the global minima of multimodal functions. MSPSO extend the original PSO by dividing the particle swarm spatially into a multiple cluster called a species in a multi-dimensional search space. Each species explores a different area of the search space and tri...

A global optimization method, conformational space annealing (CSA), is applied to study a 46-residue protein with the sequence B9N3(LB)4N3B9N3(LB)5L, where B, L and N designate hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and neutral residues, respectively. The 46-residue BLN protein is folded into the native state of a four-stranded β-barrel. It has been a challenging problem to locate the global minimum of the ...

Previous analyses of the Earth’s annual cycle and its trends have utilized surface temperature data sets. Here we introduce a new analysis of the global and hemispheric annual cycle using a satellite remote sensing derived data set during the period 1979–2009, as determined from the lower tropospheric (LT) channel of the MSU satellite. While the surface annual cycle is tied directly to the heat...