Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization Theoretical Computer Science and General Issues: 8th European Conference, EvoCOP 2008, Naples, Italy, March 26-28, 2008, Proceedings

Metaheuristics have been shown to be e?ective for di?cult combinatorial - timization problems appearing in various industrial, economical, and scienti?c domains. Prominent examples of metaheuristics are evolutionary algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing, scatter search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, iterated local search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, ant colony optimization and estimation of distribution algorithms. Problems solved successfully include scheduling, timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution, vehicle routing, the travelling salesman pr- lem, packing and cutting, satis?ability and general mixed integer programming. EvoCOPbeganin2001andhasbeenheldannuallysincethen.Itwasthe?rst event speci?cally dedicated to the application of evolutionary computation and related methods to combinatorial optimization problems. Originally held as a workshop,EvoCOPbecameaconferencein2004.Theeventsgaveresearchersan excellent opportunity to present their latest research and to discuss current - velopments and applications. Following the general trend of hybrid metaheur- tics and diminishing boundaries between the di?erent classes of metaheuristics, EvoCOP has broadened its scope over the last years and invited submissions on any kind of metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization.