...................................................................... The increasing importance of mathematical programming for the solution of complex nonlinear systems arising in practical situations requires the development of qualified optimization software. In recent years, a lot of effort has been made to implement efficient and reliable optimization programs and we can observe a wide distribution of these programs both for research and industrial applications. In spite of their practical importance only a few attempts have been made in the past to come to comparative conclusions and to give a designer the possibility to decide which optimization program could solve his individual problems in the most desirable way. Box [BO 1966J, Huang, Levy [HL 1970J, Himmelblau [HI 1971J, Dumi­ tru [DU 1974], and More, Garbow, Hillstrom [MG 1978] for example compared algorithms for unres~ricied u~~illii~Gtiv~ y~~~le~~, B~~n [BD 1970], McKeown [MK 1975], and Ramsin, Wedin [RW 1977l studied codes for nonlinear least squares problems. Codes for the linear case are compared by Bartels [BA 1975.J and Schittkowski, Stoer [SS 1979J. Extensive tests for geometric programming algorithms are found in Dembo [DE 1976bJ, Rijckaert [RI 1977], and Rijckaert, Martens [RM 1978J.