this book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th international workshop on algorithm engineering and experiments, alenex 2002, held in san francisico, ca, usa in january 2002.the 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. among the topics addressed are hewistics for algorithms, combinatorial optimization, searching, graph computation, network optimization, scheduling, computational geometry, sorting, and clustering algorithms.