A characteristic of data envelopment analysis (DEA) is to allow individual decision making units (DMUs) to select the factor weights that are the most advantages for them in calculating their efficiency scores. This flexibility in selecting the weights, on the other hand, deters the comparison among DMUs on a common base. For dealing with this difficulty and assessing all the DMUs on the same s...

Sequential (or Successive) Quadratic Programming (SQP) is a technique for the solution of Nonlinear Programming (NLP) problems. It is, as we shall see, an idealized concept, permitting and indeed necessitating many variations and modifications before becoming available as part of a reliable and efficient production computer code. In this monograph we trace the evolution of the SQP method throug...

Interior-point methods for nonlinear programming have been demonstrated to be quite efficient, especially for large scale problems, and, as such, they are ideal candidates for solving the nonlinear subproblems that arise in the solution of mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems via outer approximation. However, traditionally, infeasible primal-dual interior-point methods have had two main...

In this article we look at a new algorithm for solving convex mixed integer nonlinear programming problems. The algorithm uses an integrated approach, where a branch and bound strategy is mixed with solving nonlinear programming problems at each node of the tree. The nonlinear programming problems, at each node, are not solved to optimality, rather one iteration step is taken at each node and t...

The mine production planning defines a sequence of block extraction to obtain the highest NPV under a number of constraints. Mathematical programming has become a widespread approach to optimize production planning, for open pit mines since the 1960s. However, the previous and existing models are found to be limited in their ability to explicitly incorporate the ore grade uncertainty into the p...

In adirect collocation pseudospectralmethod, a continuous-time optimal control problem is transcribed to afinitedimensional nonlinear programming problem. Solving this nonlinear programming problem as efficiently as possible requires that sparsity at both the firstand second-derivative levels be exploited. In this paper, a computationally efficient method is developed for computing the first an...