HANDBOOK OF COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION

Combinatorial (or discrete) optimization is one of the most active fields in the interface of operations research, computer science, and applied ma- ematics. Combinatorial optimization problems arise in various applications, including communications network design, VLSI design, machine vision, a- line crew scheduling, corporate planning, computer-aided design and m- ufacturing, database query design, cellular telephone frequency assignment, constraint directed reasoning, and computational biology. Furthermore, combinatorial optimization problems occur in many diverse areas such as linear and integer programming, graph theory, artificial intelligence, and number theory. All these problems, when formulated mathematically as the minimization or maximization of a certain function defined on some domain, have a commonality of discreteness. Historically, combinatorial optimization starts with linear programming.