The
2nd International Conference on Complementarity, Duality, and Global
Optimization in Science and Engineering will take place on February 28
- March 2, 2007 in Gainesville, Florida.
This
years' conference is the second event in the series of conferences
started with The First International Conference on Complementarity,
Duality, and Global Optimization in Science and Engineering (http://www.conted.vt.edu/cdgo/)
held at the Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA in August 2005. More than 140
participants from different countries have attended the first meeting,
and their contributions will appear in special issues of the Journal of
Global Optimization, and a volume of Nonconvex Optimization and its
Applications series. We expect a high rate of participation this year
as well.
Complementarity
and duality are closely related, multi-disciplinary topics that pervade
all natural phenomena, and form the basis for solving many underlying
nonconvex or global optimization problems that arise in science and
engineering. During the last forty years, much research has been
devoted to the development of mathematical modeling, theory, and
computational methods in this arena. The field has now matured along
many directions, especially in engineering mechanics and design,
mathematical physics, economics, optimization, and control.
One
common theme in all this is that there is typically some primal problem
that is in coNP, and a dual that is in NP, and thus searchable. The
dual can give posteriori bounds on the primal, and when there is no
duality gap, can provide an exact solution. Duality may also be used to
provide proofs verifying the robustness of embedded systems in a
network environment, and in creating inference processes for comparing
data and models in biological systems. In addition, this provides a
unifying framework for treating both vertical, protocol stack
decomposition of networks, and horizontal, or distributed and
asynchronous control that occur at each level in the stack.
The
duality theory of Nonlinear Programming has had profound influence on
the theory of Approximation Algorithms for NP-hard optimization
problems. Today's application areas, such as Internet problems, network
design, and biology, are characterized by massively large problem
instances that require reliable solutions, preferably with proven
guarantees. The primal-dual schema has been successful in analyzing
several such NP-hard problems, providing algorithms with good empirical
performance. Recent extensions of this schema to handle
non-optimization problems in the nascent area of Algorithmic Game
Theory have yielded the first polynomial-time algorithm for computing
market equilibria in a framework first introduced by Irving Fischer in
1891 (assuming linear utility functions). Moreover, many new advances
in global optimization are enabling the solution of heretofore open,
difficult engineering design and process control problems to global
optimality for the very first time in the literature.
A
primary goal of this CDGO-2007 conference is to bring together
engineers, scientists, and mathematicians from a variety of related
disciplines, who are at the forefront of their research fields, to
exchange ideas and present original high-level unpublished research in
the areas of complementarity, duality, and nonconvex or global
optimization, with particular interests in the following topics:
- Complementarity in modern
mechanics and optimization;
- Duality in variational
analysis, economics, and game theory;
- Primal-dual methods and
algorithms in computational sciences;
- Min-max theory in
mathematical analysis and discrete optimization;
- Global optimization theory
and algorithms;
- Applications in internet
problems, network design, and biology;
- Natural duality and unity in
philosophy, system science, cybernetics, and informatics.
