Global optimization problems where evaluation of the objective function is an expensive operation arise frequently in engineering, decision making, optimal control, etc. There exist two huge but almost completely disjoint communities (they have different journals, different conferences, different test functions, etc.) solving these problems: a broad community of practitioners using stochastic nature-inspired metaheuristics and people from academia studying deterministic mathematical programming methods. In order to bridge the gap between these communities we propose a visual technique for a systematic comparison of global optimization algorithms having different nature. Results of more than 800,000 runs on 800 randomly generated tests show that both stochastic nature-inspired metaheuristics and deterministic global optimization methods are competitive and surpass one another in dependence on the available budget of function evaluations.

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Geometric and information frameworks for constructing global optimization algorithms are considered, and several new ideas to speed up the search are proposed. The accelerated global optimization methods automatically realize a local behavior in the promising subregions without the necessity to stop the global optimization procedure. Moreover, all the trials executed during the local phases are used also in the course of the global ones. The resulting geometric and information global optimization methods have a similar structure and a smart mixture of new, and traditional computational steps leads to 22 different global optimization algorithms. All of them are studied and numerically compared on three test sets including 120 benchmark functions and 4 applied problems.