Optimization and Applications

Abstract

This workshop was attended by 47 participants with broad geographic representation from all continents. It was enlightened by this cheerful atmosphere special to Oberwolfach, and which the participants contributed to by their mutual friendship and esteem.

The theme was optimization problems, their theory and resolution, and above all applications of them. Some emphasis was put on the still recent subject of optimization over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices (SDP). In the following 20 extended abstracts, one finds

• several papers devoted to theory per se}: exitence and stability of solutions, analysis of algorithms;
• a good number on methodology of resolution: design, development, implementation of algorithms;
• a majority dealing with applications; some such applications come from other branches of mathematics (combinatorics, dynamic systems), but most from the real world: operations research, telecommunications, production and transportation, medicine, model management.

We thank Gail Pieper (Argonne National Laboratory) for her careful proofreading of every abstract; her editorial work substantially improved the presentation of this material.