ThepapersinthisvolumewerepresentedattheSecondInternationalConference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2008), held August 21 24, 2008, in St. John s, Newfoundland, Canada. The topics cover most areas in combinatorial optimization and applications. A total of 84 papers were submitted, of which 44 were accepted for presen- tionattheconference.Theselectionwasbasedonthepapers originality,quality and relevance to combinatorial optimization. The papers were evaluated by an international Program Committee consisting of Tetsuo Asano, Sergey Bereg, Binay Bhattacharya, Hans Bodlaender, Leizhen Cai, Bo Chen, Zhixiang Chen, FrancisChin,Kyung-YongChwa,AndreasDress,Ding-ZhuDu,MichaelFellows, FedorFomin,Gena Hahn,PavolHell,Wen-LianHsu,MinghuiJiang,Ming-Yang Kao,EvangelosKranakis,MichaelLangston,GuohuiLin,RolfH.Mo hring,X- hou Tan, Dimitrios M. Thilikos, Adrian Vetta, Cao An Wang, Lusheng Wang, Todd Wareham, Peter Widmayer, Jinhui Xu, Yinfeng Xu, Boting Yang, Yinyu Ye, Guochuan Zhang, Xiao Zhou, and Binhai Zhu. It is expected that most of the accepted papers will appear in a more complete form in scienti?c journals. We received papers from Algeria, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel,Italy,Japan,Korea,Norway,Oman,Pakistan,Romania,Russia,Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK, and USA. Each paper was evaluated by at least three Program Committee members, assisted in some cases by external referees. In addition to the selected papers, the conference also included twoinvited presentationsby FrancisY.L. Chin andVijay V. Vazirani. We thank all the people who have made this meeting possible: the authors for submitting papers, the Program Committee members and external referees (listed in the proceedings)for their excellent work,and the two invited speakers. Finally, we thank the Memorial University of Newfoundland for their support and the local organizers and their colleagues for their assistance.
