This edited book is dedicated to Professor N. U. Ahmed, a leading scholar and a renowned researcher in optimal control and optimization on the occasion of his retirement from the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Ottawa in 1999. The contributions of this volume are in the areas of optimal control, non linear optimization and optimization applications. They are mainly the im proved and expanded versions of the papers selected from those presented in two special sessions of two international conferences. The first special session is Optimization Methods, which was organized...