Pattern Search Methods for User-Provided Points:Application to Molecular Geometry Problems

This paper deals with the application of pattern search methods to the numerical solution of a class of molecular geometry problems with important applications in molecular physics and chemistry. The goal is to find a configuration of a cluster or a molecule with minimum total energy. The minimization problems in this class of geometry molecular … Read more

Space mapping: Models, sensitivities, and trust-regions methods

The goal of this paper is to organize some of the mathematical and algorithmic aspects of the recently proposed space-mapping technique for continuous optimization with expensive function evaluations. First, we consider the mapping from the fine space to the coarse space when the models are vector-valued functions and when the space-mapping (nonlinear) least-squares residual is … Read more

A globally convergent primal-dual interior-point filter method for nonlinear programming

In this paper, the filter technique of Fletcher and Leyffer (1997) is used to globalize the primal-dual interior-point algorithm for nonlinear programming, avoiding the use of merit functions and the updating of penalty parameters. The new algorithm decomposes the primal-dual step obtained from the perturbed first-order necessary conditions into a normal and a tangential step, … Read more