This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Workshop on Integer Programming
that was held in Bonn, September 8-12, 1975. The Workshop was organized
by the Institute of Operations Research (Sonderforschungsbereich 21), University
of Bonn and was generously sponsored by IBM Germany. In all, 71 participants
frnm 13 different countries took part in the Workshop.
Integer programming is one of the most fascinating and difficult areas of
mathematical optimization. There are a great many real-world problems of large
dimension that urgently need to be solved, but there is a large gap between the
practical requirements and the theoretical development. Since combinatorial
problems in general are among the most difficult in mathematics, a great deal of
theoretical research is necessary before substantial advances in the practical
solution of problems can be expected. Nevertheless the rapid progress of research
in this field has produced mathematical results significant in their own right and has
also borne substantial fruit for practical applications. We believe that this will be
adequately demonstrated by the papers in this volume.
The 37 papers appearing in this volume cover a wide spectrum of topics in integer
programming. The volume includes works on the theoretical foundations of integer
programming, on algorithmic aspects of discrete optimization, on specific types of
integer programming problems, as well as on some related questions on polytopes
and on graphs and networks.
All the papers have been carefully referred. We express our sincere thanks to all
authors for their cooperation, to the referees for their useful support, to numerous
participants for stimulating discussions, and to the editors of the Annals of Discrete
Mathematics for their willingness to include this volume in their new series.