Dingzhu Du – författare

Techniques and principles of minimax theory play a key role in many areas of research, including game theory, optimization, and computational complexity. In general, a minimax problem can be formulated as min max f(x, y) (1) ",EX !lEY where f(x, y) is a function defined on the product of X and Y spaces. There are two basic issues regarding minimax problems: The first issue concerns the establishment of sufficient and necessary conditions for equality minmaxf(x,y) = maxminf(x,y). (2) "'EX !lEY !lEY "'EX The classical minimax theorem of von Neumann is a result of this type. Duality theory in linear and convex quadratic programming interprets minimax theory in a different way. The second issue concerns the establishment of sufficient and necessary conditions for values of the variables x and y that achieve the global minimax function value f(x*, y*) = minmaxf(x, y). (3) "'EX !lEY There are two developments in minimax theory that we would like to mention.

This volume can be considered as a supplementary volume to the three-volume "Handbook of Combinatorial Optimization" published by Kluwer. It can also be regarded as a stand-alone volume which presents chapters dealing with various aspects of the subject including optimization problems and algorithmic approaches for discrete problems. This handbook deals with several algorithmic approaches for discrete problems as well as with many combinatorial optimization problems. Each chapter in the handbook is expository in nature, but scholarly in treatment. The book is addressed not only to researchers in discrete optimization, but to all scientists in various disciplines who use combinatorial optimization methods to model and solve problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computing and Combinatorics, COCOON 2015, held in Beijing, China, in August 2015. database theory, computational biology and bioinformatics; computational algebra, geometry, number theory, graph drawing and information visualization;