The field of global optimization has been developing at a rapid pace. There is a journal devoted to the topic, as well as many publications and notable books discussing various aspects of global optimization. This book is intended to complement these other publications with a focus on stochastic methods for global optimization. Stochastic methods, such as simulated annealing and genetic algo- rithms, are gaining in popularity among practitioners and engineers be- they are relatively easy to program on a computer and may be cause applied to a broad class of global optimization problems....