One of the most frequently occurring types of optimization problems involves
decision variables which have to take integer values. From a practical point of
view, such problems occur in countless areas of management, engineering,
administration, etc., and include such problems as location of plants or
warehouses, scheduling of aircraft, cutting raw materials to prescribed
dimensions, design of computer chips, increasing reliability or capacity of
networks, etc. This is the class of problems known in the professional
literature as "discrete optimization" problems. While these problems are of
enormous applicability, they present many challenges from a computational point
of view. This volume is an update on the impressive progress achieved