This book presents recent developments and new trends in Combinatorial Optimization. Combinatorial Optimization is an active research area that has applications in many domains such as communications, network design, VLSI, scheduling, production, computational biology. In the past years, new results and major advances have been seen in many areas including computational complexity, approximation algorithms, cutting-plane based methods and submodularity function minimization. More efficient and powerful methods have been developed for approaching real-worlds problems, and new concepts and theoritical results have been introduced.

A. Ridha Mahjoub is Professor of Operations Research and Combinatorial Optimization at the Paris-Dauphine University, France and member of the LAMSADE laboratory CNRS. His research areas include the theory and applications of polyhedral approaches for solving large NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, linear and integer programming, network design as well as complexity and graph theory. His publications have appeared in numerous leading journals and he serves as Associate Editor for the journal RAIRO-Operations Research.