This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2017, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2017, co-located with the Evo*2017 events EuroGP, EvoMUSART and EvoApplications. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers cover both empirical and theoretical studies on a wide range of academic and real-world applications. The methods include evolutionary and memetic algorithms, large neighborhood search, estimation of distribution algorithms, beam search, ant colony optimization, hyper-heuristics and matheuristics. Applications include both traditional domains, such as knapsack problem, vehicle routing, scheduling problems and SAT; and newer domains such as the traveling thief problem, location planning for car-sharing systems and spacecraft trajectory optimization. Papers also study important concepts such as pseudo-backbones, phase transitions in local optima networks, and the analysis of operators. This wide range of topics makes the EvoCOP proceedings an important source for current research trends in combinatorial optimization.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Metaheuristics, MIC 2022, held in Syracuse, Italy, in July 2022. The 48 full papers together with 17 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The papers detail metaheuristic techniques. Chapter “Evaluating the Effects of Chaos in Variable Neighbourhood Search” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2016, held in Plymouth, UK, in June 2016. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The selected papers are of interest for all the researchers working on integrating metaheuristics with other areas for solving both optimization and constraint satisfaction problems. They represent as well a sample of current research demonstrating how metaheuristics can be integrated with integer linear programming and other operational research techniques for tackling difficult and relevant problems.

So-called string problems are abundant in bioinformatics and computational biology. New optimization problems dealing with DNA or protein sequences are constantly arising and researchers are highly in need of efficient optimization techniques for solving them. One obstacle for optimization practitioners is the atypical nature of these problems which require an interdisciplinary approach in order to solve them efficiently and accurately.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Optimization and Applications, OPTIMA 2020, held in Moscow, Russia, in September-October 2020.* The 21 full and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers cover such topics as mathematical programming, combinatorial and discrete optimization, optimal control, optimization in economics, finance, and social sciences, global optimization, and applications. * The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2019, held in Concepción, Chile, in January 2019. The 11 revised full papers and 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers present hybridization strategies and explore the integration of new techniques coming from other areas of expertise. They cover a variety of topics such as low-level hybridization, high-level hybridization, portfolio techniques, cooperative search, and theoretical aspects of hybridization.