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  • © 2012

Combinatorial Optimization

Theory and Algorithms

  • Well-written, popular textbook on combinatorial optimization
  • One of very few textbooks on this topic
  • Subject area has manifold applications
  • Offers complete but concise proofs, making it an invaluable practical tool for students
  • Updated fifth edition
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Algorithms and Combinatorics (AC, volume 21)

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Table of contents (22 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages I-XIX
  2. Introduction

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 1-12
  3. Graphs

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 13-49
  4. Linear Programming

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 51-71
  5. Linear Programming Algorithms

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 73-99
  6. Integer Programming

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 101-129
  7. Spanning Trees and Arborescences

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 131-155
  8. Shortest Paths

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 157-171
  9. Network Flows

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 173-209
  10. Minimum Cost Flows

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 211-239
  11. Maximum Matchings

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 241-271
  12. Weighted Matching

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 273-299
  13. b-Matchings and T-Joins

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 301-320
  14. Matroids

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 321-353
  15. Generalizations of Matroids

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 355-375
  16. NP-Completeness

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 377-412
  17. Approximation Algorithms

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 413-457
  18. The Knapsack Problem

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 459-470
  19. Bin-Packing

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 471-488
  20. Multicommodity Flows and Edge-Disjoint Paths

    • Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen
    Pages 489-520

About this book

This comprehensive textbook on combinatorial optimization places special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. It is based on numerous courses on combinatorial optimization and specialized topics, mostly at graduate level. This book reviews the fundamentals, covers the classical topics (paths, flows, matching, matroids, NP-completeness, approximation algorithms) in detail, and proceeds to advanced and recent topics, some of which have not appeared in a textbook before. Throughout, it contains complete but concise proofs, and also provides numerous exercises and references.

This fifth edition has again been updated, revised, and significantly extended, with more than 60 new exercises and new material on various topics, including Cayley's formula, blocking flows, faster b-matching separation, multidimensional knapsack, multicommodity max-flow min-cut ratio, and sparsest cut. Thus, this book represents the state of the art of combinatorial optimization.

Reviews

From the reviews of the fifth edition:

“The book would be most suitable as a graduate text for a mathematics or computer science course. It offers a good number of exercises … . This book excels at providing very up-to-date results that give an idea of the state of the art, but also makes it clear that this is still a very active area of research. Overall, it is a comprehensive and interesting text that manages to present both the most classical and the most recent ideas in the field.” (Angele M. Hamel, ACM Computing Reviews, August, 2012)

“This is the 5th edition of one of the standard books in combinatorial optimization. It is an excellent book covering everything from the basics up to the most advanced topics (graduate level and current research). It provides theoretical results, underlying ideas, algorithms and the needed basics in graph theory in a very nice, comprehensive way.  … ‘Combinatorial Optimization’ can easily serve as … complete reference for current research and is state-of-the-art. In this new edition references have been updated and new exercises were added.” (Sebastian Pokutta, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1237, 2012)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Forschungsinstitut für, Diskrete Mathematik, Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Bernhard Korte, Jens Vygen

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access