Introduction Network design problems arise in a wide variety of application domains. Some examples are telecommunications, logistics and transportation, and supply chain management. While the core network design problems such as the minimum spanning tree problem, and the shortest path problem are well-solved, adding additional (or different) restrictions on the network design frequently results in an N P-complete problem. Coincidentally, most network design problems that arise in practice are N

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... P-complete. When it is difficult to solve these network design problems using an exact approach, we are interested in finding good heuristic solutions to them. In this chapter, we provide practitioners guidelines for designing heuristic search techniques for network design problems. Our guidelines encompass a wide variety of search techniques starting from simple heuristics, to local search and large-scale neighborhood search, and finally to genetic algorithms. We illustrate these guidelines by sharing our experience in developing and applying these heuristic search techniques to four different network design problems: the minimum labeling spanning tree problem, the Euclidean non-uniform Steiner tree problem, the prize collecting generalized minimum spanning tree problem, and the multi-level capacitated spanning tree problem. Finally, we provide an annotated bibliography to selectively describe some recent research work in this area.