Numerical Analysis and Optimization: NAO-IV, Muscat, Oman, January 2017

Conferences in the NAO (Numerical Analysis and Optimization) series are held every three years at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). The purpose of the series is to bring together a group of worldwide experts, to provide a platform for highlighting novel and advanced applications of their recent research, and to facilitate interdisciplinary studies among various key sectors of pure scientific and applied knowledge. Ideally, the conference will become a forum where prominent scientists gather and meet, stimulating the exchange of innovative ideas and perspectives on new scientific methodologies, and promoting future collaborations. Many real-world complex problems can be formulated as optimization tasks and be characterized further as large-scale, constrained or unconstrained, non-convex, non-differentiable, and discontinuous; accordingly, obtaining the best possible solution often requires the use of computational methods, algorithms, and software tools that involve big data; optimization and other complex numerical algorithms in the cloud; and devising special techniques for supercomputing systems. Each peer-reviewed chapter in this book reports on developments in key fields, such as numerical analysis; numerical optimization; numerical linear algebra; numerical differential equations; optimal control; approximation theory; applied mathematics; derivative-free optimization methods; programming models; and challenging applications that frequently arise in Statistics, Econometrics, Finance, Physics, Medicine, Biology, Engineering and Industry. This book is dedicated to the late Professors Mike JD Powell and Roger Fletcher, who were the pioneers and leading figures in the mathematics of nonlinear optimization.