Guest Editors’ Forward

Abstract

The 12th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON’2006) was held at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan on August 15–18, 2006. 137 extended abstracts were submitted from 27 countries and regions in the world, of which 52 were accepted (including a merged paper from two extended abstracts). Among those accepted extended abstracts, five very nice papers in the area of algorithm design and analysis were selected and invited to this special issue of Algorithmica for COCOON’2006. These five papers all went through the normal review process of Algorithmica and were accepted for publication. The papers in this special issue represent various exciting aspects of the current algorithmic research. Bereg et al.’s paper develops a simple polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the geometric problem of finding a sequence of lines to cut a convex n-gon out of a convex m-gon such that the cost of the cutting sequence is minimized. Chan et al.’s paper considers a general dynamic bin packing problem in which the items may arrive to and depart from the packing at arbitrary time and whose objective is to minimize the maximum number of bins used over all time; they obtain an interesting improved lower bound of the competitive ratio for the online version and new results for the resource augmentation version of the problem.