Ashok D. Belegundu has been a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University since 1986. Prior to this, he taught at Kettering University, Michigan. He received his B. Tech. from I.I.T. Madras and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He has been a principal investigator on research projects involving optimization for several agencies including the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, NASA, SERC (UK), MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation, Gentex Corporation, and Ingersoll-Rand. He has organized two international conferences on optimization in industry and has authored or edited four books and written a chapter in a book. He has advised more than fifty graduate students. He has given short courses on finite elements and optimization to the Forging Industry Association, Hazleton Pumps, Infosys (India). He has served as an associate editor for AIAA Journal and for Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines. He teaches a distance education course on optimal design through Pennsylvania State University.

Preface; 1. Preliminary concepts; 2. One-dimensional unconstrained minimization; 3. Unconstrained optimization; 4. Linear programming; 5. Constrained minimization; 6. Penalty functions, duality, and geometric programming; 7. Direct search methods for nonlinear optimization; 8. Multi-objective optimization; 9. Integer and discrete programming; 10. Dynamic programming; 11. Optimization applications for transportation, assignment, and network problems; 12. Finite element and simulation-based optimization; Index.