Multi-Level Programming

It was stated in Chap. 2 that multi-level programming1 is a recently developed mathematical programming technique (Candler and Norton 1977) and that experiments are still going on to develop an algorithm to solve an MLP. In most of the existing MLP algorithms, some sort of transformation of the original problem is necessary. This makes the MLP solution relatively difficult, because the size of the transformed MLP becomes large in comparison with the original problem. Existing algorithms are usually not commercially available.