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                            CALL FOR PAPERS

                              EvoCOP 2008

          Eighth European Conference on Evolutionary Computation
                      in Combinatorial Optimization

                   Naples, Italy, 26-28 March 2008

                        http://www.evostar.org
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Topics
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Metaheuristics have often been shown to be effective for difficult
combinatorial optimization problems appearing in various industrial,
economical, and scientific domains. Prominent examples of
metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu
search, scatter search and path relinking, memetic algorithms, ant
colony and particle swarm optimization, variable neighborhood 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,
traveling 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. Each accepted paper 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, and 4446 for the previous proceedings).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Applications of metaheuristics to combinatorial optimization problems
- 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

The conference will be held in conjunction with the 11th European
Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP2008), the 6th European
Conference on Evolutionary Computation (EvoBIO2008) and
EvoWorkshops2008, a collection of application-oriented workshops in
the field of evolutionary computation.


Submission
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Submit your manuscript (PDF or postscript, max. 12 pages, Springer LNCS
style) electronically using the online submission service (available
soon) no later than November 1, 2007. IMPORTANT: The reviewing process
will be double-blind, so please omit information about the authors in
the submitted paper. The submissions will be peer reviewed by at least
three members of the program committee.

Authors will be notified on the results of the review around December
15, 2007. 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 by January 8, 2008.


Important Dates
---------------

Submission deadline:         1 November 2007
Notification of acceptance:  15 December 2007
Camera ready papers due:     8 January 2008
Events:                      26-28 March 2008


Program Chairs
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Carlos Cotta (Universidad de Malaga, Spain)
Jano van Hemert (National e-Science Institute, University of
Edinburgh, UK)


More Information
----------------

More detailed information on the event, including venue, committees,
contact addresses, etc., can be found at the Evo* homepage:

http://www.evostar.org