George L. Nemhauser – författare

The chapters of this Handbook volume cover nine main topics that are representative of recenttheoretical and algorithmic developments in the field. In addition to the nine papers that present the state of the art, there is an article on the early history of the field.

The handbook will be a useful reference to experts in the field as well as students and others who want to learn about discrete optimization.

Collected together in this book are ten state-of-the-art expository articles on the most important topics in optimization, written by leading experts in the field. The book therefore provides a primary reference for those performing research in some area of optimization or for those who have some basic knowledge of optimization techniques but wish to learn the most up-to-date and efficient algorithms for particular classes of problems. The first sections of each chapter are expository and therefore accessible to master's level graduate students. However, the chapters also contain advanced material on current topics of interest to researchers. For instance there are chapters which describe the polynomial-time linear programming algorithms of Khachian and Karmarkar and the techniques used to solve combinatorial and integer programming problems, an order of magnitude larger than was possible just a few years ago. Overall a comprehensive yet lively and up-to-date discussion of the state-of-the-art in optimization is presented in this book.

In 1958, Ralph E. Gomory transformed the field of integer programming when he published a paper that described a cutting-plane algorithm for pure integer programs and announced that the method could be refined to give a finite algorithm for integer programming. In 2008, to commemorate the anniversary of this seminal paper, a special workshop celebrating fifty years of integer programming was held in Aussois, France, as part of the 12th Combinatorial Optimization Workshop.

It contains reprints of key historical articles and written versions of survey lectures on six of the hottest topics in the field by distinguished members of the integer programming community. Useful for anyone in mathematics, computer science and operations research, this book exposes mathematical optimization, specifically integer programming and combinatorial optimization, to a broad audience.