Tuesday, September 20, 2016

[DMANET] Special issue of ITOR on Matheuristics

Call for Papers

Special issue on "Matheuristics" of Interational Transactions of Operational Research (ITOR)

Guest Editors:
Thomas Stützle, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
Vittorio Maniezzo, Università di Bologna, Italy

Matheuristics are methods that exploit mathematical programming techniques in heuristic and metaheuristic frameworks, granting to mathematical programming approaches the problem robustness and time effectiveness that characterize heuristics, or exploiting the mathematical programming model formulation in the customization of a heuristic for specific problems. In fact, progress in mathematical programming has led to a state of the art where exact methods, most notably Mixed Integer Programming solvers, can be effective even in a heuristic context both as primary solvers or as sub-procedures.

This special issue of ITOR aims at collecting contributions that define the state of the art for the computational effectiveness and efficiency or the theoretical properties of matheuristics.

The deadline for submission is October 15, 2016. Although we strongly encourage authors who presented their work at Matheuristics 2016 to submit their manuscripts, this Call for Papers is open to the entire research community. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

* Model-based metaheuristics
* Hybridizing (meta)heuristics and exact methods
* MIP techniques used for defining heuristic solvers (such as local branching and RINS)
* Problem relaxations to guide heuristic search
* Decompositions and lower/upper bounds in matheuristic codes
* Stochastic programming and heuristic search
* Design and configuration of matheuristic algorithms
* Experimental analysis and modeling of algorithms
* High impact applications of matheuristics.

Although we do not discard their importance, the special issue is not interested in heuristics tailored to a specific problem that have no element that can be generalized to other problems (no matter how mathematically sophisticated they are) nor in metaheuristic variants or implementations that are not justified by a mathematical model.

Each paper will be peer-reviewed according to the editorial policy of ITOR (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118505725/home), published by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). Papers should be original, unpublished, and not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. They should be prepared according to the instructions to authors that can be found in the journal homepage. Authors should upload their contributions using the submission site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itor, indicating in their cover letter that the paper is intended for this special issue. Other inquiries should be sent directly to any of the Guest Editors in charge of this issue: Thomas Stützle (stuetzle@ulb.ac.be) and Vittorio Maniezzo (vittorio.maniezzo@unibo.it).

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