This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Experimental and Efficient Algorithms, WEA 2003, held in Ascona, Switzerland in May 2003. The 19 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The focus of the volume is on applications of efficient algorithms for combinatorial problems.

The subject matter of this textbook is the treatment of difficult to solve discrete optimisation problems. The first part presents fast algorithms which can provide approximate solutions to such problems. The second part deals with complexity theory and the non-approximability of optimisation problems. In addition, this textbook contains numerous application examples, exercises, illustrations and sections on the basics such as the Turing machine.