Knapsack Problems

Book excerpt: Thirteen years have passed since the seminal book on knapsack problems by Martello and Toth appeared. On this occasion a former colleague exclaimed back in 1990: "How can you write 250 pages on the knapsack problem?" Indeed, the definition of the knapsack problem is easily understood even by a non-expert who will not suspect the presence of challenging research topics in this area at the first glance. However, in the last decade a large number of research publications contributed new results for the knapsack problem in all areas of interest such as exact algorithms, heuristics and approximation schemes. Moreover, the extension of the knapsack problem to higher dimensions both in the number of constraints and in the num ber of knapsacks, as well as the modification of the problem structure concerning the available item set and the objective function, leads to a number of interesting variations of practical relevance which were the subject of intensive research during the last few years. Hence, two years ago the idea arose to produce a new monograph covering not only the most recent developments of the standard knapsack problem, but also giving a comprehensive treatment of the whole knapsack family including the siblings such as the subset sum problem and the bounded and unbounded knapsack problem, and also more distant relatives such as multidimensional, multiple, multiple-choice and quadratic knapsack problems in dedicated chapters.