Combinatorial Analysis

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.

Data Correcting Approaches in Combinatorial Optimization focuses on algorithmic applications of the well known polynomially solvable special cases of computationally intractable problems. The purpose of this text is to design practically efficient algorithms for solving wide classes of combinatorial optimization problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2006, held in Budapest, Hungary in April 2006.
The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. The papers cover evolutionary algorithms as well as various other metaheuristics, like scatter search, tabu search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm optimization algorithms. The papers deal with representations, heuristics, analysis of problem structures, and comparisons of algorithms. The list of studied combinatorial optimization problems includes prominent examples like graph coloring, knapsack problems, the traveling salesperson problem, scheduling, graph matching, as well as specific real-world problems.