Iterative Methods in Combinatorial Optimization

Lap-Chi Lau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lap-Chi's main research interests are in combinatorial optimization and graph algorithms. His paper on Steiner tree packing was given the Machtey award in the IEEE Foundations of Computer Science Conference. His Ph.D. thesis was awarded the Doctoral Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society and a Doctoral Prize from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. R. Ravi is Carnegie Bosch Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Ravi's main research interests are in combinatorial optimization (particularly in approximation algorithms), computational molecular biology and electronic commerce. He is currently on the editorial boards of Management Science and the ACM Transactions on Algorithms. Mohit Singh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, McGill University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2008 at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, where his advisor was Professor R. Ravi. His thesis was awarded the Tucker prize by the Mathematical Programming Society. His research interests include approximation algorithms, combinatorial optimization and studying models that deal with uncertainty in data.

1. Introduction; 2. Preliminaries; 3. Matching and vertex cover in bipartite graphs; 4. Spanning trees; 5. Matroids; 6. Arborescence and rooted connectivity; 7. Submodular flows and applications; 8. Network matrices; 9. Matchings; 10. Network design; 11. Constrained optimization problems; 12. Cut problems; 13. Iterative relaxation: early and recent examples; 14. Summary.