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This books covers the analysis and development of online algorithms involving exact optimization and heuristic techniques, and their application to solve two real life problems. The first problem is concerned with a complex technical system: a special carousel based high-speed storage system - Rotastore. It is shown that this logistic problem leads to an NP-hard Batch PreSorting problem which is not easy to solve optimally in offline situations. The second problem originates in the health sector and leads to a vehicle routing problem. Reasonable solutions for the offline case covering a whole day with a few hundred orders are constructed with a heuristic approach, as well as by simulated annealing. Optimal solutions for typical online instances are computed by an efficient column enumeration approach leading to a set partitioning problem and a set of routing-scheduling subproblems. The latter are solved exactly with a branch-and-bound method which prunes nodes if they are value-dominated by previous found solutions or if they are infeasible with respect to the capacity or temporal constraints.