This special issue contains eight selected papers from the International Workshop on Modern Optimization and Applications, which was held over three days, 27-29 June 2016 at Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. This conference brought together leading scientists, researchers, and practitioners from world to exchange and shared ideas and approaches in using modern optimization techniques to model and solve real-world application problems from engineering, industry, and management. A prominent feature of this conference is the mixture of optimization theory, optimization methods, and practice of mathematical optimization. This conference provided a forum for researchers from academy to present their latest theoretical results while practitioners from industry to describe their real-world applications and discuss with researchers the best way to construct suitable optimization models and how to find algorithms capable of solving these models.