The editors and authors dedicate this book to Bernhard Korte on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. We, the editors, are happy about the overwhelming feedback to our initiative to honor him with this book and with a workshop in Bonn on November 3–7,2008.Althoughthiswouldbeareasontolookback,wewouldratherliketolook forward and see what are the interesting research directions today. This book is written by leading experts in combinatorial optimization. All - pers were carefully reviewed, and eventually twenty-three of the invited papers were accepted for this book. The breadth of topics is typical for the eld: combinatorial optimization builds bridges between areas like combinatorics and graph theory, submodular functions and matroids, network ows and connectivity, approximation algorithms and mat- matical programming, computational geometry and polyhedral combinatorics. All these topics are related, and they are all addressed in this book. Combi- torial optimization is also known for its numerous applications. To limit the scope, however, this book is not primarily about applications, although some are mentioned at various places. Most papers in this volume are surveys that provide an excellent overview of an activeresearcharea,butthisbookalsocontainsmanynewresults.Highlightingmany of the currently most interesting research directions in combinatorial optimization, we hope that this book constitutes a good basis for future research in these areas.

The editors and authors dedicate this book to Bernhard Korte on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. We, the editors, are happy about the overwhelming feedback to our initiative to honor him with this book and with a workshop in Bonn on November 3–7,2008.Althoughthiswouldbeareasontolookback,wewouldratherliketolook forward and see what are the interesting research directions today. This book is written by leading experts in combinatorial optimization. All - pers were carefully reviewed, and eventually twenty-three of the invited papers were accepted for this book. The breadth of topics is typical for the eld: combinatorial optimization builds bridges between areas like combinatorics and graph theory, submodular functions and matroids, network ows and connectivity, approximation algorithms and mat- matical programming, computational geometry and polyhedral combinatorics. All these topics are related, and they are all addressed in this book. Combi- torial optimization is also known for its numerous applications. To limit the scope, however, this book is not primarily about applications, although some are mentioned at various places. Most papers in this volume are surveys that provide an excellent overview of an activeresearcharea,butthisbookalsocontainsmanynewresults.Highlightingmany of the currently most interesting research directions in combinatorial optimization, we hope that this book constitutes a good basis for future research in these areas.

There have been significant developments in the theory and practice of combinatorial optimization in the last 15 years. This progress has been evidenced by a continuously increasing number of international and local conferences, books and papers in this area. This book is also another contribution to this burgeoning area of operations research and optimization. This volume contains the contributions of the participants of the recent NATO Ad vanced Study Institute, New Frontiers in the Theory and Practice of Combinatorial Op timization, which was held at the campus of Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey, July 16-29, 1990. In this conference, we brought many prominent researchers and young and promising scientists together to discuss current and future trends in the theory and prac tice of combinatorial optimization. The Bilkent campus was an excellent environment for such an undertaking. Being outside of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, Bilkent University gave the participants a great opportunity for exchanging ideas and discussing new theories and applications without much distraction. One of the primary goals of NATO ASIs is to bring together a group of scientists and research scientists primarily from the NATO countries for the dissemination of ad vanced scientific knowledge and the promotion of international contacts among scientists. We believe that we accomplished this mission very successfully by bringing together 15 prominent lecturers and 45 promising young scientists from 12 countries, in a university environment for 14 days of intense lectures, presentations and discussions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2017, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2017, co-located with the Evo*2017 events EuroGP, EvoMUSART and EvoApplications. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers cover both empirical and theoretical studies on a wide range of academic and real-world applications. The methods include evolutionary and memetic algorithms, large neighborhood search, estimation of distribution algorithms, beam search, ant colony optimization, hyper-heuristics and matheuristics. Applications include both traditional domains, such as knapsack problem, vehicle routing, scheduling problems and SAT; and newer domains such as the traveling thief problem, location planning for car-sharing systems and spacecraft trajectory optimization. Papers also study important concepts such as pseudo-backbones, phase transitions in local optima networks, and the analysis of operators. This wide range of topics makes the EvoCOP proceedings an important source for current research trends in combinatorial optimization.

Rave reviews for INTEGER AND COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION "This book provides an excellent introduction and survey of traditional fields of combinatorial optimization . . . It is indeed one of the best and most complete texts on combinatorial optimization . . . available. [And] with more than 700 entries, [it] has quite an exhaustive reference list."-Optima "A unifying approach to optimization problems is to formulate them like linear programming problems, while restricting some or all of the variables to the integers. This book is an encyclopedic resource for such formulations, as well as for understanding the structure of and solving the resulting integer programming problems."-Computing Reviews "[This book] can serve as a basis for various graduate courses on discrete optimization as well as a reference book for researchers and practitioners."-Mathematical Reviews "This comprehensive and wide-ranging book will undoubtedly become a standard reference book for all those in the field of combinatorial optimization."-Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society "This text should be required reading for anybody who intends to do research in this area or even just to keep abreast of developments."-Times Higher Education Supplement, London Also of interest . . . INTEGER PROGRAMMING Laurence A. Wolsey Comprehensive and self-contained, this intermediate-level guide to integer programming provides readers with clear, up-to-date explanations on why some problems are difficult to solve, how techniques can be reformulated to give better results, and how mixed integer programming systems can be used more effectively. 1998 (0-471-28366-5) 260 pp.