Special issue on recent advances in metaheuristics

Abstract

Since 1995, the Metaheuristics International Conferences have been the meeting point of the leading researchers in the highly successful area of metaheuristics. The seventh of these conferences, MIC 2007, was held in Montreal, Canada, in June 2007 in honor of Fred Glover’s 70th birthday. The presence of more than 200 participants from all around the world and the more than 135 plenary and contributed talks that were presented reflected the extraordinary vitality of the field and the essential role of metaheuristics in addressing complex optimization problems. In connection with the activities of this conference, we are very glad to present this special issue of the Journal of Heuristics, devoted to Recent Advances in Metaheuristics. We sought submissions from the entire international research community in metaheuristics. Twenty-seven manuscripts were received and went through a strict review process, at the end of which twelve papers covering a broad spectrum of methodological and application topics in metaheuristics were selected for publication in this special issue. The first four papers of the special issue focus on new approaches that combine metaheuristics with other problem-solving paradigms to yield highly effective solution methods for difficult problems. In “Alternating Control Tree Search for Knap-