In the last few decades, a number of powerful methods have been proposed to find satisfactory solutions to management problems of great importance in economies open to competition. They have been successfully applied to solve a large variety of operational problems both in the private and public sector: for example, production scheduling and sequencing, transportation, traffic management, distribution of goods and portfolio selection. The first half of this book presents an overview of these methods, while the second half focuses on applications. More precisely, it describes how to tailor heuristics to get the best results in a variety of selected typical problems.