In February 1992, I defended my doctoral thesis: Engineering Optimiza tion - selected contributions (IMSOR, The Technical University of Den mark, 1992, p. 92). This dissertation presents retrospectively my central contributions to the theoretical and applied aspects of optimization. When I had finished my thesis I became interested in editing a volume related to a new expanding area of applied optimization. I considered several approaches: simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, neural networks, heuristics, expert systems, generalized multipliers, etc. Finally, I decided to edit...