This book has grown out of graduate courses given by the author at
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, as well as a series of
seminars delivered at Curtin University of Technology, Western
Australia. The book is intended to be used both as a textbook at the
graduate level and also as a professional reference. The topic of
one-factorizations fits into the theory of combinatorial designs just as
much as it does into graph theory. Factors and factorizations occur as
building blocks in the theory of designs in a number of places. Our
approach owes as much to design theory as it does to graph theory. It is
expected that nearly all readers will have some background in the theory
of graphs, such as an advanced undergraduate course in Graph Theory or
Applied Graph Theory. However, the book is self-contained, and the first
two chapters are a thumbnail sketch of basic graph theory. Many readers
will merely skim these chapters, observing our notational conventions
along the way. (These introductory chapters could, in fact, enable some
instructors to Ilse the book for a somewhat eccentric introduction to
graph theory.) Chapter 3 introduces one-factors and one-factorizations.
The next two chapters outline two major application areas: combinatorial
arrays and tournaments. These two related areas have provided the
impetus for a good deal of study of one-factorizations.
