HM 2016

Metaheuristics, such as simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, tabu search, ant colony optimization, scatter search and iterated local search, are considered state-of-the-art methods for many problems. In recent years, however, it has become evident that the concentration on a sole metaheuristic is rather restrictive. A skilled combination of concepts from different optimization techniques can provide a more efficient behavior and a higher flexibility when dealing with real-world and large-scale problems. Hybrid Metaheuristics are such techniques for optimization that combine different metaheuristics or integrate AI/OR techniques into metaheuristics.

Contributions solicited cover a variety of topics including but not limited to:

• Novel combinations of components from different metaheuristics
• Hybridization of metaheuristics and AI/OR techniques
• Low-level hybridization
• High-level hybridization, portfolio techniques, expert systems
• Cooperative search
• Automated parameter tuning
• Empirical and statistical comparison
• Theoretical aspects of hybridization
• Parallelization
• Software libraries

      Submission due: February 5, 2016

      Notification: March 26, 2016

      Camera-ready due: April 9, 2016

      Early registration: April 15, 2016

Authors are encouraged to submit novel and unpublished original contributions in one of the topics of the Workshop, and explain how their work sheds light on the fundamental properties of hybrid metaheuristics field, and makes progress on the important open questions.

Please prepare your paper in English using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) template.

When submitting a paper, authors are required to select one of the following types of papers:

• regular paper: 15 pages maximum length in Springer LNCS format, including figures, table & references, and should report on new and unpublished work;
• work for oral or poster presentation only (no page restriction; any format). For example, work already published elsewhere, which is relevant and which may solicit fruitful discussion at the workshop;

For the regular papers, the reviewing process will be blind, therefore, please, omit information about the authors in the submitted manuscript.

Proofs omitted due to space constraints must be put into an appendix to be read by the program committee members at their discretion.

Simultaneous submission to other conferences or workshops with published proceedings is not allowed.

All accepted regular papers will be published in a volume of the series on Lecture Notes in Computer Science from Springer.

Electronic submissions should be formatted in pdf.

All the other kind of submissions (short papers, abstract of the oral presentations, poster presentations) will be published on the HM 2016 web site.

All papers must be submitted in PDF using EasyChair Submission System. The link to submit papers is the following: easychair – HM 2016.

The deadline for ALL the types of submissions is February 5, 2016.

Significantly extended versions of selected papers from the LNCS proceedings of HM 2016 will be considered for a special issue in Soft Computing.

Any questions regarding the submission process can be sent to workshop organizers: hm2016@dmi.unict.it