Network flow theory has been used across a number of disciplines, including theoretical computer science, operations research, and discrete math, to model not only problems in the transportation of goods and information, but also a wide range of applications from image segmentation problems in computer vision to deciding when a baseball team has been eliminated from contention. This graduate text and reference presents a succinct, unified view of a wide variety of efficient combinatorial algorithms for network flow problems, including many results not found in other books. It covers maximum flows, minimum-cost flows, generalized flows, multicommodity flows, and global minimum cuts and also presents recent work on computing electrical flows along with recent applications of these flows to classical problems in network flow theory.

Discrete optimization problems are everywhere, from traditional operations research planning problems, such as scheduling, facility location, and network design; to computer science problems in databases; to advertising issues in viral marketing. Yet most such problems are NP-hard. Thus unless P = NP, there are no efficient algorithms to find optimal solutions to such problems. This book shows how to design approximation algorithms: efficient algorithms that find provably near-optimal solutions. The book is organized around central algorithmic techniques for designing approximation algorithms, including greedy and local search algorithms, dynamic programming, linear and semidefinite programming, and randomization. Each chapter in the first part of the book is devoted to a single algorithmic technique, which is then applied to several different problems. The second part revisits the techniques but offers more sophisticated treatments of them. The book also covers methods for proving that optimization problems are hard to approximate. Designed as a textbook for graduate-level algorithms courses, the book will also serve as a reference for researchers interested in the heuristic solution of discrete optimization problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2007, held in Ithaca, NY, USA, in June 2007.

The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from over 120 submissions. Among the topics addressed are approximation algorithms, algorithmic game theory, branch and bound algorithms, branch and cut algorithms, computational biology, computational complexity, computational geometry, cutting plane algorithms, diophantine equations, geometry of numbers, graph and network algorithms, integer programming, matroids and submodular functions, on-line algorithms and competitive analysis, polyhedral combinatorics, randomized algorithms, random graphs, scheduling theory and scheduling algorithms, as well as semidefinite programs.

Network flow theory has been used across a number of disciplines, including theoretical computer science, operations research, and discrete math, to model not only problems in the transportation of goods and information, but also a wide range of applications from image segmentation problems in computer vision to deciding when a baseball team has been eliminated from contention. This graduate text and reference presents a succinct, unified view of a wide variety of efficient combinatorial algorithms for network flow problems, including many results not found in other books. It covers maximum flows, minimum-cost flows, generalized flows, multicommodity flows, and global minimum cuts and also presents recent work on computing electrical flows along with recent applications of these flows to classical problems in network flow theory.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2021, which took place during May 19-21, 2021. The conference was organized by Georgia Institute of Technology and planned to take place it Atlanta, GA, USA, but changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 33 papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. IPCO is under the auspices of the MathematicalOptimization Society, and it is an important forum for presenting the latest results of theory and practice of the various aspects of discrete optimization.