Significant research activities have taken place in the areas of local and global optimization in the last two decades. Many new theoretical, computational, algorithmic, and software contributions have resulted. It has been realized that despite these numerous contributions, there does not exist a systematic forum for thorough experimental computational testing and- evaluation of the proposed optimization algorithms and their implementations. Well-designed nonconvex optimization test problems are of major impor- tance for academic and industrial researchers interested in algorithmic and...