Introduction

Abstract

Discrete and continuous nonconvex programming problems arise in a host of practical applications in the context of production, location-allocation, distribution, economics and game theory, process design, and engineering design situations. Several recent advances have been made in the development of branch-and-cut algorithms for discrete optimization problems and in polyhedral outer-approximation methods for continuous nonconvex programming problems. At the heart of these approaches is a sequence of linear programming problems that drive the solution process. The success of such algorithms is strongly linked to the strength or tightness of the linear programming representations employed.