9725220 Polak This is a collaborative research project between Elijah Polak and his student, Ismail S. Khalil Bustany, at the University of California, Berkeley, and Liqun Qi and Robert Wormseley and their students, Zenxin Wei from China and Quoc- Thong Le-Gia from Vietnam, at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, aimed at developing efficient superlinearly converging algorithms for the solution of minimax problems in engineering design. A large number of engineering design problems, such as design of wind and seismic resistant structures, electronic circuit centering, and robot motion planning, can be cast in the form of minimax problems. Because of their considerable economic importance, the construction of efficient algorithms is an important problem. This U.S.-Australia collaboration brings together the expertise in engineering optimization, semi- finite optimization, and local algorithm globalization available at Berkeley, with the expertise in the construction of superlinearly converging generalized Newton Type methods for nonsmooth optimization and numerical analysis available in Sydney.
