evocop

12th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation

Metaheuristics are used to solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial, economic, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics include: evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, scatter search and path relinking, memetic algorithms, ant colony and particle swarm optimization, variable neighbourhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, estimation of distribution algorithms, and hyperheuristics. Successfully solved problems include scheduling, timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution problems, vehicle routing, travelling salesman, graph problems, satisfiability, packing problems, planning problems, and general mixed integer programming.

The evocop series, started in 2001 and held annually since then, was the first event specifically dedicated to the application of evolutionary computation and related methods to combinatorial optimization problems. Following the general trend of hybrid metaheuristics and diminishing boundaries between the different classes of metaheuristics, evocop broadened its scope in 2006, and now explicitly invites submissions on any kind of metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization.

The conference will be held in conjunction with eurogp (the 15th European Conference on Genetic Programming), evobio (the 10th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Computational Biology), evomusart (1st international conference and 10th european event 
on evolutionary and biologically inspired music, sound, art and design) and evoapplications (including specialist events on a range of evolutionary computation topics and applications), in a joint event collectively known as evo*.

Areas of Interest and Contributions

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Applications of metaheuristics to combinatorial optimization problems
  • Novel application domains for metaheuristic optimisation methods
  • Representation techniques
  • Neighborhoods and efficient algorithms for searching them
  • Variation operators for stochastic search methods
  • Constraint-handling techniques
  • Hybrid methods and hybridization techniques
  • Parallelization
  • Theoretical developments
  • Search space analyses
  • Comparisons between different (also exact) techniques
  • Automated tuning of metaheuristics using machine learning, evolutionary and other approaches

Publication Details

All accepted papers will be presented orally at the conference and printed in the proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series (see LNCS volumes 2037, 2279, 2611, 3004, 3448, 3906, 4446, 4972 and 5482 for the previous proceedings).

Submission Details

Submissions must be original and not published elsewhere. The submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the basis of the reviewers’ comments and will be asked to send a camera ready version of their manuscripts. At least one author of each accepted work has to register for the conference and attend the conference and present the work.

The reviewing process will be double-blind, please omit information about the authors in the submitted paper. Submit your manuscript in Springer LNCS format.

submission link: http://myreview.csregistry.org/evocop12/
page limit: 12 pages

Important Dates

submission deadline: 7 December 2011
evo* event: 11-13 april 2011

Programme Chairs

Jin-Kao Hao
University of Angers, France
hao(at)info.univ-angers.fr

Martin Middendorf
Univerisity of Leipzig, Germany
middendorf(at)informatik.uni-leipzig.de