Improving the efficiency of DC global optimization methods by improving the DC representation of the objective function

There are infinitely many ways of representing a d.c. function as a difference of convex functions. In this paper we analyze how the computational efficiency of a d.c.optimization algorithm depends on the representation we choose for the objective function, and we address the problem of characterizing and obtaining a computationally optimal representation. We introduce some theoretical concepts which are necessary for this analysis and report some numerical experiments. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.