This volume contains a selection of papers referring to lectures presented at the symposium "Operations Research 2003" (OR03) held at the Ruprecht- Karls-Universitiit Heidelberg, September 3 - 5, 2003. This international con- ference took place under the auspices of the German Operations Research So- ciety (GOR) and of Dr. Erwin Teufel, prime minister of Baden-Wurttemberg. The symposium had about 500 participants from countries all over the world. It attracted academians and practitioners working in various field of Opera- tions Research and provided them with the most recent advances in Opera- tions Research and related areas in Economics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. The program consisted of 4 plenary and 13 semi-plenary talks and more than 300 contributed papers selected by the program committee to be presented in 17 sections. Due to a limited number of pages available for the proceedings volume, the length of each article as well as the total number of accepted contributions had to be restricted. Submitted manuscripts have therefore been reviewed and 62 of them have been selected for publication. This refereeing procedure has been strongly supported by the section chairmen and we would like to express our gratitude to them. Finally, we also would like to thank Dr. Werner Muller from Springer-Verlag for his support in publishing this proceedings volume.

The effective management of transportation resources can reduce the expenses of an organization significantly. For these reasons the study of routing problems has been an important area of operations research for the last fifty years, and its significance is still growing with the increasing numbers of companies and organizations that have to deal with transport activities. This book deals with a major subclass of routing problems, so called postman problems, where services have to be performed along streets, e.g., postal service, waste collection or street cleaning activities. The introductory part of the book gives a comprehensive survey to routing problems. The main part of the book is dedicated to an in-depth treatment of postman problems with multiple postmen. The author presents fundamental and well known methods as well as new algorithms to attack these problems effectively. This book is valuable for mathematicians, computer scientists and economists who have to solve multiple postmen problems in theory and practice.