This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parallel Algorithms for Irregularly Structured Problems, IRREGULAR '96, held in Santa Barbara, California, in August 1996. The volume presents 28 revised full papers selected from 51 submissions; also included are one full invited paper by Torben Hagerup and abstracts of four other invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on sparse matrix problems, partitioning and domain composition, irregular applications, communication and synchronization, systems support, and mapping and load balancing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Solving Irregularly Structured Problems in Parallel, IRREGULAR'97, held in Paderborn, Germany, in June 1997. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully selected by the program committee for inclusion in the volume; also included are full papers by the five invited speakers. Among the topics covered are discrete algorithms, randomized methods and approximation algorithms, implementations, programming environments, systems and applications, and scheduling and load balancing.

Efficient parallel solutions have been found to many problems. Some of them can be obtained automatically from sequential programs, using compilers. However, there is a large class of problems - irregular problems - that lack efficient solutions. IRREGULAR 94 - a workshop and summer school organized in Geneva - addressed the problems associated with the derivation of efficient solutions to irregular problems. This book, which is based on the workshop, draws on the contributions of outstanding scientists to present the state of the art in irregular problems, covering aspects ranging from scientific computing, discrete optimization, and automatic extraction of parallelism. Audience: This first book on parallel algorithms for irregular problems is of interest to advanced graduate students and researchers in parallel computer science.

The goal of the Encyclopedia of Optimization is to introduce the reader to a complete set of topics that show the spectrum of research, the richness of ideas, and the breadth of applications that has come from this field. The second edition builds on the success of the former edition with more than 150 completely new entries, designed to ensure that the reference addresses recent areas where optimization theories and techniques have advanced. Particularly heavy attention resulted in health science and transportation, with entries such as "Algorithms for Genomics", "Optimization and Radiotherapy Treatment Design", and "Crew Scheduling".

Nonlinear Assignment Problems (NAPs) are natural extensions of the classic Linear Assignment Problem, and despite the efforts of many researchers over the past three decades, they still remain some of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems to solve exactly. The purpose of this book is to provide in a single volume, major algorithmic aspects and applications of NAPs as contributed by leading international experts. The chapters included in this book are concerned with major applications and the latest algorithmic solution approaches for NAPs. Approximation algorithms, polyhedral methods, semidefinite programming approaches and heuristic procedures for NAPs are included, while applications of this problem class in the areas of multiple-target tracking in the context of military surveillance systems, of experimental high energy physics, and of parallel processing are presented. Audience: Researchers and graduate students in the areas of combinatorial optimization, mathematical programming, operations research, physics, and computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP '97, held in Bologna, Italy, in July 1997. ICALP '97 celebrated the 25th anniversary of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), which has sponsored the ICALP meetings since 1972. The volume presents 73 revised full papers selected from a total of 197 submissions. Also included are six invited contributions. ICALP is one of the few flagship conferences in the area. The book addresses all current topics in theoretical computer science.

This book provides both the research and practitioner communities with a comprehensive coverage of the metaheuristic methodologies that have proven to be successful in a wide variety of real-world problem settings. Moreover, it is these metaheuristic strategies that hold particular promise for success in the future. The various chapters serve as stand alone presentations giving both the necessary background underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation.