Xiaodong Hu - Böcker

We organize approximation algorithms into different chapters, based on the design techniques for the algorithms, so that the reader can study approximation algorithms of the same nature together.

This book is intended to be used as a textbook for graduate students studying theoretical computer science. It can also be used as a reference book for researchers in the area of design and analysis of approximation algorithms. Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithms is a graduate course in theoretical computer science taught widely in the universities, both in the United States and abroad. There are, however, very few textbooks available for this course. Among those available in the market, most books follow a problem-oriented format; that is, they collected many important combinatorial optimization problems and their approximation algorithms, and organized them based on the types, or applications, of problems, such as geometric-type problems, algebraic-type problems, etc. Such arrangement of materials is perhaps convenient for a researcher to look for the problems and algorithms related to his/her work, but is difficult for a student to capture the ideas underlying the various algorithms. In the new book proposed here, we follow a more structured, technique-oriented presentation. We organize approximation algorithms into different chapters, based on the design techniques for the algorithms, so that the reader can study approximation algorithms of the same nature together. It helps the reader to better understand the design and analysis techniques for approximation algorithms, and also helps the teacher to present the ideas and techniques of approximation algorithms in a more unified way.

Introductory courses in combinatorial optimization are popular at the upper undergraduate/graduate levels in computer science, industrial engineering, and business management/OR, owed to its wide applications in these fields.

Introductory courses in combinatorial optimization are popular at the upper undergraduate/graduate levels in computer science, industrial engineering, and business management/OR, owed to its wide applications in these fields.

The refereed proceedings of the 14th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON 2008, held in Dalian, China, in June 2008. The 66 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 172 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms and data structures, algorithmic game theory and online algorithms, automata, languages, logic, and computability, combinatorics related to algorithms and complexity, complexity theory, cryptography, reliability and security, and database theory, computational biology and bioinformatics, computational algebra, geometry, and number theory, graph drawing and information visualization, graph theory and algorithms, communication networks, and optimization, wireless network, network optimization, and scheduling problem.