This book provides a good opportunity for computer science practitioners and researchers to get in sync with the current state-of-the-art and future trends in the field of combinatorial optimization and online algorithms. Recent advances in this area are presented focusing on the design of efficient approximation and on-line algorithms. One central idea in the book is to use a linear program relaxation of the problem, randomization and rounding techniques.

This state-of-the-art survey contains 11 carefully selected papers that cover some classical problems of scheduling, of packing, and of graph theory, but also new optimization problems arising in various applications like networks, data mining or classification.