This volume collects together some of the papers presented at the Seventh French-German Conference on Optimization held at Dijon (France) in 1994. About 150 scientists, mainly from Germany and France, but also from other countries, met at Dijon (June 27 - July 2, 1994) and discussed recent develop­ ments in the field of optimization. 87 lectures were delivered, covering a large part of theoretical and practical aspects of optimization. Most of the talks were scheduled in two parallel sessions, according to topics such as optimization and variational inequalities, sensivity and stability analysis, control theory, vector optimization, convex and nonsmooth analysis. This conference was the seventh in a series which started in 1980. Proceedings of the previous French-German Conferences on Optimization have been published as follows: First Conference (Oberwolfach 1980): Optimization and Optimal Control, edited by A. Auslender, W. Oettli and J. Stoer (Lectures Notes in Con­ trol and Information Sciences, 30) Springer-Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1981. Second Conference (Confolant, 1981): Optimization, edited by J.B. Hiriart­ Urruty, W. Oettli and J. Stoer (Lectures Notes in Pure and Applied Math­ ematics, 86) Marcel Dekker, New York and Basel, 1983. Third Conference (Luminy, 1984): Third Franco-German Conference in Optimization, edited by C. LemarEkhal. Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Rocquencourt, 1984 (ISBN 2-7261- 0402-9). Fourth Conference (Irsee, 1986): Trends in Mathematical Optimization, edited fy K. Hoffmann, J.B. Hiriart-Urruty, C. Lemarechal and J. Zowe (International Series of Numerical Mathematics, 84) Birkhauser Verlag, Basel and Boston, 1988.