This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Optimization and Applications, OPTIMA 2018, held in Petrovac, Montenegro, in October 2018. The 35 revised full papers and the one short paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mathematical programming; combinatorial and discrete optimization; optimal control; optimization in economy, finance and social sciences; applications.