************************************************************************ EvoCOP 2019 - The 19th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation http://www.evostar.org/2019/cfp_evocop.php April 24 - April 26, 2019 Leipzig, Germany held as part of EvoStar (http://www.evostar.org) ************************************************************************ The 19th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together researchers working on evolutionary computation methods and other metaheuristics for solving difficult combinatorial optimisation problems appearing in various industrial, economic, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics include: evolutionary algorithms, estimation of distribution algorithms, swarm intelligence methods such as ant colony and particle swarm optimisation, local search methods such as simulated annealing, tabu search, variable neighbourhood search, iterated local search, scatter search and path relinking, and their hybridisation, such as memetic algorithms. Automatic algorithm configuration and design, meta-optimisation, model-based methods, and hyperheuristics are also topics of interest. Successfully solved problems include, but are not limited to, multi-objective, uncertain, dynamic and stochastic problems in the context of scheduling, timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution, vehicle routing, graph problems, satisfiability, energy optimisation, cutting, packing, and planning problems. The EvoCOP 2019 conference will be held in the city of Leipzing, Germany, together with EuroGP (the 22nd European Conference on Genetic Programming), EvoMUSART (the 8th European conference on evolutionary and biologically inspired music, sound, art and design) and EvoApplications (the 22nd European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation), in a joint event collectively known as EvoStar (Evo*). **** Areas of Interest and Contributions **** Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Applications of metaheuristics to combinatorial optimisation problems * Representation techniques * Practical solution of NP-hard problems * Neighbourhoods and efficient algorithms for searching them * Variation operators for stochastic search methods * Theoretical developments * Constraint-handling techniques * Parallelisation and grid computing * Search space and landscape analyses * Comparisons between different (also exact) methods * Heuristics * Genetic programming and Genetic algorithms * Tabu search, iterated local search and variable neighbourhood search * Ant colony optimisation * Artificial immune systems * Scatter search * Particle swarm optimisation * Memetic algorithms * Hybrid methods and hybridisation techniques * Matheuristics (hybrids of exact and heuristic methods) * Hyper-heuristics and autonomous search * Automatic algorithm configuration and design * Metaheuristics and machine learning * Surrogate-model-based methods * Estimation of distribution algorithms * String processing * Scheduling and timetabling * Network design * Vehicle routing * Graph problems * Satisfiability * Packing and cutting problems * Energy optimisation problems * Multi-objective optimisation * Search-based software engineering Notice that, by tradition, continuous/numerical optimisation is *not* part of the topics of interest of EvoCOP. Interested authors might consider submitting to other EvoStar conferences such as EvoApplications. **** Publication Details **** EvoCOP 2019 will accept three types of submissions: * Regular 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, 5482, 6022, 6622, 7245, 7832, 8600, 9026, 9595, 10197 and 10782 for the previous proceedings). The best regular paper presented at EvoCOP 2019 will be distinguished with a *Best Paper Award*. Authors nominated for the best regular paper award will be invited for fast track publication in the *Evolutionary Computation Journal*. The invited submissions must significantly extend the conference paper and will undergo peer review. * Reproducibility studies are concise and rigorous experimental studies that replicate published experiments, and that substantially shift the confidence in the main results of the original study. We strongly encourage the authors to discuss the reasons for the new findings, such as, e.g., input data not considered in the original work or different implementation details. A reproducibility study should follow the usual reproducibility standards, that is, it should provide complete details about the implementation, compiler options, input data description, algorithmic parameters, operating system and hardware specification. Moreover, the code should be available in a public repository immediately after the submission to EvoCOP and should remain available after publication in the proceedings. Statistical analysis, if applicable, should provide details about the statistical assumptions and statistical testing procedures. Although it is expected that textual similarity between the reproducibility study and the original work may arise, the usual plagiarism standards will be taken into account. Reproducibility studies will take the form of short papers presented orally at the conference and published in the Springer LNCS proceedings. * Late-breaking abstracts (LBAs) summarise ongoing research, recent studies and applications of evolutionary computation and other meta-heuristics to real-world or academic combinatorial optimisation problems. LBAs will be presented as short talks during the conference. **** Submission Details **** Paper submissions must be original and not published elsewhere. The submissions will be peer reviewed by 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, 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. Page limit (Regular papers): 16 pages Page limit (Reproducibility studies): 8 pages Page limit (LBAs): 1-2 pages **** Important Dates **** Submission deadline (Regular papers, Reproducibility studies): November 1, 2018 Submission deadline (LBAs): TBA EvoStar: April 24-26, 2019 **** EvoCOP Programme Chairs **** Arnaud Liefooghe University of Lille, France [log in to unmask] Luís Paquete University of Coimbra, Portugal [log in to unmask] -- Luís Paquete | [log in to unmask] http://www.uc.pt/go/paquete Dept. of Informatics Engineering University of Coimbra, Portugal ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the META-HEURISTICS list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=META-HEURISTICS&A=1