XVI, 192, 15 b/w illustrations, 43 illustrations in colour., This book describes a general hybrid metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization labeled Construct, Merge, Solve & Adapt (CMSA). The general idea of standard CMSA is the following one. At each iteration, a number of valid solutions to the tackled problem instance are generated in a probabilistic way. Hereby, each of these solutions is composed of a set of solution components. The components found in the generated solutions are then added to an initially empty sub-instance. Next, an exact solver is applied in order to compute the best solution of the sub-instance, which is then used to update the sub-instance provided as input for the next iteration. In this way, the power of exact solvers can be exploited for solving problem instances much too large for a standalone application of the solver., During the time of writing this book, the author was supported as principal investigator of the following three grants funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033: PID2019-104156GB-I00, PID2022-136787NB-I00, and TED2021-129319B-I00., Peer reviewed