The authors’ original motivation for the book was a one-semester course on network optimization for senior masters’ level classes of econometrics and operations research. The textbook suitable for a ‘middle level’ course for a student of econometrics or operations research interested in not only in reading about network optimization theory, but also providing first-hand experience in solving and analyzing reasonably sized programs with computer software. The book’s distinctive feature is the set of problems included with each chapter.

The text book should sparking students’ interest in modeling problems as networks, to sensitize them to the fact that elegant and effective solution methods are available once a problem gets modeled as a network, and to guide them to use computer based software tools to solve these problems.

Each chapter ends with a brief description of additional problems that are related to problems described in the chapter. These additional problems are left unsolved in order to show students that the problems appearing in each of the chapters are not the only problems with which network optimization deals. These additional problems should spur the students’ interest to extensions to the problems that also are described in the chapters.