In recent years much attention has been given to the development of auto- matic systems of planning, design and control in various branches of the national economy. Quality of decisions is an issue which has come to the forefront, increasing the significance of optimization algorithms in math- ematical software packages for al, ltomatic systems of various levels and pur- poses. Methods for minimizing functions with discontinuous gradients are gaining in importance and the xperts in the computational methods of mathematical programming tend to agree that progress in the development of...