The papers in this volume consider a general area of study known as network routing. The underlying problems are conceptually simple, yet mathematically complex and challenging. How can we best route material or people from one place to another? Or, how can we best design a system (for instance locate facilities) to provide services and goods as efficiently and equitably as possible? The problems encountered in answering these questions often have an underlying combinatorial structure, for example, either we dispatch a vehicle or we do not, or we use one particular route or another. The problems also typically have an underlying network structure (a communication or transportation network). In addition, models for these problems are often very large with hundreds or thousands of constraints and variables. A companion volume in the "Handbook" series, entitled "Network Models", treats basic network models such as minimum cost flows, matching and the travelling salesman problem, as well as, several complex network topics, not directly related to routing, such as network design and network reliability.

The set of papers in this handbook reflect the varied theory and wide range of applications of network models. Two of the most vibrant applications areas of network models are telecommunications and transportation. Several chapters explicitly model issues arising in these problem domains. Research on network models has been closely aligned with the field of computer science both in developing data structures for efficiently implementing network algorithms and in analyzing the complexity of network problems and algorithms. The basic structure underlying all network problems is a graph. Thus, historically, there have been strong ties between network models and graph theory. A companion volume in the "Handbook" series, entitled "Network Routing", examines problems related to the movement of commodities over a network. The problems treated arise in several application areas including logistics, telecommunications, facility location, VLSI design, and economics.

Collected together in this book are ten state-of-the-art expository articles on the most important topics in optimization, written by leading experts in the field. The book therefore provides a primary reference for those performing research in some area of optimization or for those who have some basic knowledge of optimization techniques but wish to learn the most up-to-date and efficient algorithms for particular classes of problems. The first sections of each chapter are expository and therefore accessible to master's level graduate students. However, the chapters also contain advanced material on current topics of interest to researchers. For instance there are chapters which describe the polynomial-time linear programming algorithms of Khachian and Karmarkar and the techniques used to solve combinatorial and integer programming problems, an order of magnitude larger than was possible just a few years ago. Overall a comprehensive yet lively and up-to-date discussion of the state-of-the-art in optimization is presented in this book.

The chapters of this Handbook volume covers nine main topics that are representative of recent
theoretical and algorithmic developments in the field. In addition to the nine papers that present the state of the art, there is an article on
the early history of the field.

The handbook will be a useful reference to experts in the field as well as students and others who want to learn about discrete optimization.

All of the chapters in this handbook are written by authors who have made significant original contributions to their topics. Herewith a brief introduction to the chapters of the handbook.

"On the history of combinatorial optimization (until 1960)" goes back to work of Monge in the 18th century on the assignment problem and presents six problem areas: assignment, transportation,
maximum flow, shortest tree, shortest path and traveling salesman.

The branch-and-cut algorithm of integer programming is the computational workhorse of discrete optimization. It provides the tools that have been implemented in commercial software such as CPLEX
and Xpress MP that make it possible to solve practical problems in supply chain, manufacturing, telecommunications and many other areas.
"Computational integer programming and cutting planes" presents the key ingredients
of these algorithms.

Although branch-and-cut based on linear programming relaxation is the most widely used integer programming algorithm, other approaches are
needed to solve instances for which branch-and-cut performs poorly and to understand better the structure of integral polyhedra. The next three chapters discuss alternative approaches.

"The structure of grouprelaxations" studies a family of polyhedra obtained by dropping certain
nonnegativity restrictions on integer programming problems.

Although integer programming is NP-hard in general, it is polynomially solvable in fixed dimension. "Integer programming, lattices, and results in fixed dimension" presents results in this area including algorithms that use reduced bases of integer lattices that are capable of solving certain classes of integer programs that defy solution by branch-and-cut.

Relaxation or dual methods, such as cutting plane algorithms, progressively remove infeasibility while maintaining optimality to the relaxed problem. Such algorithms have the disadvantage of
possibly obtaining feasibility only when the algorithm terminates.Primal methods for integer programs, which move from a feasible solution to a better feasible solution, were studied in the 1960's
but did not appear to be competitive with dual methods. However, recent development in primal methods presented in "Primal integer programming" indicate that this approach is not just interesting theoretically but may have practical implications as well.

The study of matrices that yield integral polyhedra has a long tradition in integer programming. A major breakthrough occurred in the 1990's with the development of polyhedral and structural results
and recognition algorithms for balanced matrices. "Balanced matrices" is a tutorial on the
subject.

Submodular function minimization generalizes some linear combinatorial optimization problems such as minimum cut and is one of the fundamental problems of the field that is solvable in polynomial
time. "Submodular function minimization"presents the theory and algorithms of this subject.

In the search for tighter relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems, semidefinite programming provides a generalization of
linear programming that can give better approximations and is still polynomially solvable. This subject is discussed in "Semidefinite programming and integer programming,"

Many real world problems have uncertain data that is known only probabilistically. Stochastic programming treats this topic, but until recently it was limited, for computational reasons, to
stochastic linear programs. Stochastic integer programming is now a high profile research area and recent developments are presented in
"Algorithms for stochastic mixed-integer programming
models,"

Resource constrained scheduling is an example of a class of combinatorial optimization problems that is not naturally formulated with linear constraints so that linear programming based methods do
not work well. "Constraint programming" presents an alternative enumerative approach that is complementary to branch-and-cut. Constraint programming, primarily designed for feasibility problems, does not use a relaxation to obtain bounds. Instead nodes of the search tree are
pruned by constraint propagation, which tightens bounds on variables until their values are fixed or their domains are shown to be empty.

In 1958, Ralph E. Gomory transformed the field of integer programming when he published a paper that described a cutting-plane algorithm for pure integer programs and announced that the method could be refined to give a finite algorithm for integer programming. In 2008, to commemorate the anniversary of this seminal paper, a special workshop celebrating fifty years of integer programming was held in Aussois, France, as part of the 12th Combinatorial Optimization Workshop. It contains reprints of key historical articles and written versions of survey lectures on six of the hottest topics in the field by distinguished members of the integer programming community. Useful for anyone in mathematics, computer science and operations research, this book exposes mathematical optimization, specifically integer programming and combinatorial optimization, to a broad audience.