Filling the gap between introductory and encyclopedic treatments, this book provides rich and appealing material for a second course in combinatorial optimization. This book is suitable for graduate students as well as a reference for established researchers.

This is a supplementary volume to the major three-volume Handbook of Combinatorial Optimization set. It can also be regarded as a stand-alone volume presenting chapters dealing with various aspects of the subject in a self-contained way.

This book grew out of the fourth Special Year at DIMACS, which was devoted to the subject of combinatorial optimization. During the special year, a number of workshops, small and large, dealt with various aspects of this theme. Organizers of the workshops and selected participants were asked to write surveys about the hottest results and ideas in their fields. Therefore, this book is not a set of conference proceedings but rather a carefully refereed collection of invited survey articles written by outstanding researchers. Aimed at researchers in discrete mathematics, operations research, and the theory of computing, this book offers an in-depth look at many topics not treated in textbooks.

With the advent of approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, several techniques from exact optimization such as the primal-dual method have proven their staying power and versatility. This book describes a simple and powerful method that is iterative in essence and similarly useful in a variety of settings for exact and approximate optimization. The authors highlight the commonality and uses of this method to prove a variety of classical polyhedral results on matchings, trees, matroids and flows. The presentation style is elementary enough to be accessible to anyone with exposure to basic linear algebra and graph theory, making the book suitable for introductory courses in combinatorial optimization at the upper undergraduate and beginning graduate levels. Discussions of advanced applications illustrate their potential for future application in research in approximation algorithms.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2016, held in Liège, Belgium, in June 2016. The 33 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The conference is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on various aspects of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. The aim is to present recent developments in theory, computation, and applications in these areas. The scope of IPCO is viewed in a broad sense, to include algorithmic and structural results in integer programming and combinatorial optimization as well as revealing computational studies and novel applications of discrete optimization to practical problems.

This well-written textbook on combinatorial optimization puts special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. The book contains complete (but concise) proofs, as well as many deep results, some of which have not appeared in any previous books.

This comprehensive textbook on combinatorial optimization places special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. It is based on numerous courses on combinatorial optimization and specialized topics, mostly at graduate level. This book reviews the fundamentals, covers the classical topics (paths, flows, matching, matroids, NP-completeness, approximation algorithms) in detail, and proceeds to advanced and recent topics, some of which have not appeared in a textbook before. Throughout, it contains complete but concise proofs, and also provides numerous exercises and references. This fifth edition has again been updated, revised, and significantly extended, with more than 60 new exercises and new material on various topics, including Cayley's formula, blocking flows, faster b-matching separation, multidimensional knapsack, multicommodity max-flow min-cut ratio, and sparsest cut. Thus, this book represents the state of the art of combinatorial optimization.

Historically, there is a close connection between geometry and optImization. This is illustrated by methods like the gradient method and the simplex method, which are associated with clear geometric pictures. In combinatorial optimization, however, many of the strongest and most frequently used algorithms are based on the discrete structure of the problems: the greedy algorithm, shortest path and alternating path methods, branch-and-bound, etc. In the last several years geometric methods, in particular polyhedral combinatorics, have played a more and more profound role in combinatorial optimization as well. Our book discusses two recent geometric algorithms that have turned out to have particularly interesting consequences in combinatorial optimization, at least from a theoretical point of view. These algorithms are able to utilize the rich body of results in polyhedral combinatorics. The first of these algorithms is the ellipsoid method, developed for nonlinear programming by N. Z. Shor, D. B. Yudin, and A. S. NemirovskiI. It was a great surprise when L. G. Khachiyan showed that this method can be adapted to solve linear programs in polynomial time, thus solving an important open theoretical problem. While the ellipsoid method has not proved to be competitive with the simplex method in practice, it does have some features which make it particularly suited for the purposes of combinatorial optimization. The second algorithm we discuss finds its roots in the classical "geometry of numbers", developed by Minkowski. This method has had traditionally deep applications in number theory, in particular in diophantine approximation.

An overview of the rapidly growing field of ant colony optimization that describes theoretical findings, the major algorithms, and current applications. The complex social behaviors of ants have been much studied by science, and computer scientists are now finding that these behavior patterns can provide models for solving difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The attempt to develop algorithms inspired by one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find what computer scientists would call shortest paths, has become the field of ant colony optimization (ACO), the most successful and widely recognized algorithmic technique based on ant behavior. This book presents an overview of this rapidly growing field, from its theoretical inception to practical applications, including descriptions of many available ACO algorithms and their uses. The book first describes the translation of observed ant behavior into working optimization algorithms. The ant colony metaheuristic is then introduced and viewed in the general context of combinatorial optimization. This is followed by a detailed description and guide to all major ACO algorithms and a report on current theoretical findings. The book surveys ACO applications now in use, including routing, assignment, scheduling, subset, machine learning, and bioinformatics problems. AntNet, an ACO algorithm designed for the network routing problem, is described in detail. The authors conclude by summarizing the progress in the field and outlining future research directions. Each chapter ends with bibliographic material, bullet points setting out important ideas covered in the chapter, and exercises. Ant Colony Optimization will be of interest to academic and industry researchers, graduate students, and practitioners who wish to learn how to implement ACO algorithms.

Computational complexity, originated from the interactions between computer science and numerical optimization, is one of the major theories that have revolutionized the approach to solving optimization problems and to analyzing their intrinsic difficulty.The main focus of complexity is the study of whether existing algorithms are efficient for the solution of problems, and which problems are likely to be tractable.The quest for developing efficient algorithms leads also to elegant general approaches for solving optimization problems, and reveals surprising connections among problems and their solutions.This book is a collection of articles on recent complexity developments in numerical optimization. The topics covered include complexity of approximation algorithms, new polynomial time algorithms for convex quadratic minimization, interior point algorithms, complexity issues regarding test generation of NP-hard problems, complexity of scheduling problems, min-max, fractional combinatorial optimization, fixed point computations and network flow problems.The collection of articles provide a broad spectrum of the direction in which research is going and help to elucidate the nature of computational complexity in optimization. The book will be a valuable source of information to faculty, students and researchers in numerical optimization and related areas.