This volume entitled "EUROPT - A European Initiative on Optimum Design in Aerodynamics" contains the results of the contributors during a workshop which took place in Barcelona in June 1992. This workshop was organized in the framp work of the Brite/Euram Aeronautics project "Optimum Design in Aerodynamics" (AERO-89-0026). The project brought together nine European partners from Acade my and Industry with big experience in numerical optimization techniques applif''d to automated optimum design. The manuscript is directed to the optimization field and its goal is to provide the reader with useful numerical optimization techniques for optimum design in aerody namIcs. The field of numerical optimization techniques has been growing since the early 50''s. But only recently, with the recent advent of powerful computers. it has yielded real-life applications that demonstrate industrial potential for design purposes. Nowadays, optimization is at the stage where those scientists and engineers who have worked in the field are to be paid to apply numerical optimization to automated design of real problems, namely aerodynamic shapes in Aerospace Engineering. For the above reasons, it was evident that a Workshop on numerical optimization techniques for the validation of optimum design methods would be of interest to most of the partners involved in the AERO-S9-0026 project in order to compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency several optimization soft wares performed on the same selected flow problems.
