During the last three decades, breakthroughs in computer technology have made a tremendous impact on optimization. In particular, parallel computing has made it possible to solve larger and computationally more difficult prob lems. This volume contains mainly lecture notes from a Nordic Summer School held at the Linkoping Institute of Technology, Sweden in August 1995. In order to make the book more complete, a few authors were invited to contribute chapters that were not part of the course on this first occasion. The purpose of this Nordic course in advanced studies was three-fold. One goal was to introduce the students to the new achievements in a new and very active field, bring them close to world leading researchers, and strengthen their competence in an area with internationally explosive rate of growth. A second goal was to strengthen the bonds between students from different Nordic countries, and to encourage collaboration and joint research ventures over the borders. In this respect, the course built further on the achievements of the "Nordic Network in Mathematical Programming," which has been running during the last three years with the support ofthe Nordic Council for Advanced Studies (NorFA). The final goal was to produce literature on the particular subject, which would be available to both the participating students and to the students of the "next generation" ."

During the last three decades, breakthroughs in computer technology have made a tremendous impact on optimization. In particular, parallel computing has made it possible to solve larger and computationally more difficult problems. The book covers recent developments in novel programming and algorithmic aspects of parallel computing as well as technical advances in parallel optimization. Each contribution is essentially expository in nature, but of scholarly treatment. In addition, each chapter includes a collection of carefully selected problems. The first two chapters discuss theoretical models for parallel algorithm design and their complexity. The next chapter gives the perspective of the programmer practicing parallel algorithm development on real world platforms. Solving systems of linear equations efficiently is of great importance not only because they arise in many scientific and engineering applications but also because algorithms for solving many optimization problems need to call system solvers and subroutines (chapters four and five). Chapters six through thirteen are dedicated to optimization problems and methods. They include parallel algorithms for network problems, parallel branch and bound techniques, parallel heuristics for discrete and continuous problems, decomposition methods, parallel algorithms for variational inequality problems, parallel algorithms for stochastic programming, and neural networks. Audience: Parallel Computing in Optimization is addressed not only to researchers of mathematical programming, but to all scientists in various disciplines who use optimization methods in parallel and multiprocessing environments to model and solve problems.