Monotone smoothing splines with bounds

The problem of monotone smoothing splines with bounds is formulated as a constrained minimization problem of the calculus of variations. Existence and uniqueness of solutions of this problem is proved, as well as the equivalence of it to a finite dimensional but nonlinear optimization problem. A new algorithm for computing the solution which is a spline curve, using a branch and bound technique, is presented. The method is applied to examples in neuroscience and for fitting cumulative distribution functions from data.