CFP: Evolutionary Computation Journal (MIT Press) special issue on "Combinatorial Optimization Problems"

Special Issue in Evolutionary Computation Journal, MIT Press, on Combinatorial Optimization Problems

DESCRIPTION

Combinatorial Optimization Problems consist in finding an optimal solution (according to some objective function) from a finite search space. These problems arise in Industry and Academia and, unfortunately, most of them cannot be solved efficiently, that is, they are NP-hard and no polynomial time algorithm is known to solve them. For this reason, in the last decades researches have investigated the use of stochastic search algorithms to find near optimal solutions to these problems. In particular, a great research effort has been devoted to the development of metaheuristic algorithms to solve combinatorial optimization problems.

Successfully solved problems include scheduling, timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution problems, vehicle routing, travelling salesman, graph problems, satisfiability, energy optimization problems, packing problems and planning problems.

Prominent examples of metaheuristics include evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, scatter search, memetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, variable neighbourhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms, hyperheuristics and hybrid algorithms.

We encourage authors to submit original high-quality research on the application of metaheuristic algorithms to combinatorial optimization problems or theoretical aspects of this application.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All submissions have to be prepared according to the "guidelines for authors" as published in the journal website at http://ecj.fhv.at. Authors should submit their manuscripts to the Evolutionary Computation Editorial Manager at http://ecj.fhv.at . When submitting a paper, please send at the same time an email to Francisco Chicano (chicano@lcc.uma.es) and a copy to ecj@fhv.at mentioning the special issue, the paper title, and author list to inform about the submission.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE

15 August 2015       submission deadline
15 December 2015     authors notification
15 March 2016        authors’ revisions
1 July 2016          final notification
15 July 2016         final manuscript
Winter 2016          tentative publication

GUEST EDITORS

Francisco Chicano
e-mail: chicano@lcc.uma.es
University of Malaga, Spain

Christian Blum
e-mail: christian.blum@ehu.es
University of the Basque Country, Spain

Gabriela Ochoa
e-mail: gabriela.ochoa@cs.stir.ac.uk
University of Stirling, Scotland, UK