This book is the first comprehensive tutorial on matheuristics. Matheuristics are based on mathematical extensions of previously known heuristics, mainly metaheuristics, and on original, area-specific approaches. This tutorial provides a detailed discussion of both contributions, presenting the pseudocodes of over 40 algorithms, abundant literature references, and for each case a step-by-step description of a sample run on a common Generalized Assignment Problem example. C++ source codes of all algorithms are available in an associated SW repository.

Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are among the most prominent and successful techniques for solving computationally difficult problems in many areas of computer science and operations research, including propositional satisfiability, constraint satisfaction, routing, and scheduling. SLS algorithms have also become increasingly popular for solving challenging combinatorial problems in many application areas, such as e-commerce and bioinformatics.
Hoos and Stutzle offer the first systematic and unified treatment of SLS algorithms. In this groundbreaking new book, they examine the general concepts and specific instances of SLS algorithms and carefully consider their development, analysis and application. The discussion focuses on the most successful SLS methods and explores their underlying principles, properties, and features. This book gives hands-on experience with some of the most widely used search techniques, and provides readers with the necessary understanding and skills to use this powerful tool.
*Provides the first unified view of the field.
*Offers an extensive review of state-of-the-art stochastic local search algorithms and their applications.
*Presents and applies an advanced empirical methodology for analyzing the behavior of SLS algorithms.
*A companion website offers lecture slides as well as source code and Java applets for exploring and demonstrating SLS algorithms.

Metaheuristics have been a very active research topic for more than two decades. During this time many new metaheuristic strategies have been devised, they have been experimentally tested and improved on challenging benchmark problems, and they have proven to be important tools for tackling optimization tasks in a large number of practical applications. In other words, metaheuristics are nowadays established as one of the main search paradigms for tackling computationally hard problems. Still, there are a large number of research challenges in the area of metaheuristics. These challenges range from more fundamental questions on theoretical properties and performance guarantees, empirical algorithm analysis, the effective configuration of metaheuristic algorithms, approaches to combine metaheuristics with other algorithmic techniques, towards extending the available techniques to tackle ever more challenging problems. This edited volume grew out of the contributions presented at the ninth Metaheuristics International Conference that was held in Udine, Italy, 25-28 July 2011. The conference comprised 117 presentations of peer-reviewed contributions and 3 invited talks, and it has been attended by 169 delegates. The chapters that are collected in this book exemplify contributions to several of the research directions outlined above.

Metaheuristics have been a very active research topic for more than two decades. During this time many new metaheuristic strategies have been devised, they have been experimentally tested and improved on challenging benchmark problems, and they have proven to be important tools for tackling optimization tasks in a large number of practical applications. In other words, metaheuristics are nowadays established as one of the main search paradigms for tackling computationally hard problems. Still, there are a large number of research challenges in the area of metaheuristics. These challenges range from more fundamental questions on theoretical properties and performance guarantees, empirical algorithm analysis, the effective configuration of metaheuristic algorithms, approaches to combine metaheuristics with other algorithmic techniques, towards extending the available techniques to tackle ever more challenging problems. This edited volume grew out of the contributions presented at the ninth Metaheuristics International Conference that was held in Udine, Italy, 25-28 July 2011. The conference comprised 117 presentations of peer-reviewed contributions and 3 invited talks, and it has been attended by 169 delegates. The chapters that are collected in this book exemplify contributions to several of the research directions outlined above.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2014. This volume contains 17 full papers, 9 short papers, and 7 extended abstracts carefully selected out of 55 submissions. The papers cover empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence such as: behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, swarm robotics systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2012. This volume contains 15 full papers, 20 short papers, and 7 extended abstracts carefully selected out of 81 submissions. The papers cover various topics of swarm intelligence.

LION 3, the Third International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Op- mizatioN, was held during January 14-18 in Trento, Italy. The LION series of conferences provides a platform for researchers who are interested in the int- section of e?cient optimization techniques and learning. It is aimed at exploring the boundaries and uncharted territories between machine learning, arti?cial intelligence, mathematical programming and algorithms for hard optimization problems. The considerable interest in the topics covered by LION was re?ected by the overwhelming number of 86 submissions, which almost doubled the 48 subm- sions received for LION's second edition in December 2007. As in the ?rst two editions, the submissions to LION 3 could be in three formats: (a) original novel and unpublished work for publication in the post-conference proceedings, (b) extended abstracts of work-in-progressor a position statement, and (c) recently submitted or published journal articles for oral presentations. The 86 subm- sions received include 72, ten, and four articles for categories (a), (b), and (c), respectively.

Stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms are established tools for the solution of computationally hard problems arising in computer science, business adm- istration, engineering, biology, and various other disciplines. To a large extent, their success is due to their conceptual simplicity, broad applicability and high performance for many important problems studied in academia and enco- tered in real-world applications. SLS methods include a wide spectrum of te- niques, ranging from constructive search procedures and iterative improvement algorithms to more complex SLS methods, such as ant colony optimization, evolutionary computation, iterated local search, memetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, and variable neighborhood search. Historically, the development of e?ective SLS algorithms has been guided to a large extent by experience and intuition. In recent years, it has become - creasingly evident that success with SLS algorithms depends not merely on the adoption and e?cient implementation of the most appropriate SLS technique for a given problem, but also on the mastery of a more complex algorithm - gineering process. Challenges in SLS algorithm development arise partly from the complexity of the problems being tackled and in part from the many - grees of freedom researchers and practitioners encounter when developing SLS algorithms. Crucial aspects in the SLS algorithm development comprise al- rithm design, empirical analysis techniques, problem-speci?c background, and background knowledge in several key disciplines and areas, including computer science, operations research, arti?cial intelligence, and statistics.

The series of biannual international conferences "ANTS - International C- ference on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence", now in its sixth edition, was started ten years ago, with the organization of ANTS'98. As some readers might recall, the ?rst edition of ANTS was titled "ANTS'98 - From Ant Colonies to Arti?cial Ants: First International Workshop on Ant Colony Op- mization. " In fact, at that time the focus was mainly on ant colony optimization (ACO), the ?rst swarm intelligence algorithm to go beyond a pure scienti?c interest and to enter the realm of real-world applications. Interestingly, in the ten years after the ?rst edition there has been a gr- ing interest not only for ACO, but for a number of other studies that belong more generally to the area of swarmintelligence. The rapid growth of the swarm intelligence ?eld is attested by a number of indicators. First, the number of s- missions and participants to the ANTS conferences has steadily increased over the years. Second, a number of international conferences in computational - telligence and related disciplines organize workshops on subjects such as swarm intelligence, ant algorithms, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm op- mization. Third, IEEE startedorganizing,in 2003,the IEEE SwarmIntelligence Symposium (in order to maintain unity in this growing ?eld, we are currently establishingacooperationagreementbetweenIEEE SISandANTSsoastohave 1 IEEE SIS in odd years and ANTS in even years). Last, the Swarm Intelligence journal was born.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms 2007, held in Brussels, Belgium, September 6-8, 2007.

The 12 revised full papers presented together with 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 50 submissions. The topics include Methodological developments, behavior of SLS algorithms, search space analysis, algorithm performance, tuning procedures, AI/OR techniques and dynamic behaviour.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2006, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2006.

The 27 revised full papers, 23 revised short papers, and 12 extended abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The papers are devoted to theoretical and foundational aspects of ant algorithms, evolutionary optimization, ant colony optimization, and swarm intelligence and deal with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking, operations research, multiagent systems, robot systems, networking, etc.

1 With its fourth edition, the ANTS series of workshops has changed its name. Theoriginal"ANTS-FromAntColoniestoArti?cialAnts: InternationalWo- shop on Ant Algorithms" has become "ANTS - International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence." This change is mainly due to the following reasons. First, the term "ant algorithms" was slower in spreading in the research community than the term "swarm intelligence," while at the sametime research inso-calledswarm robotics wasthesubjectofincreasingactivity: itwastherefore an obvious choice to substitute the term ant algorithms with the more accepted and used term swarm intelligence. Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a 2 number of interesting and promising research directions, we think it is fair to say that its most successful strand is the one known as "ant colony optimi- tion."Ant colony optimization, ?rst introducedin the early1990sasa noveltool fortheapproximatesolutionofdiscreteoptimizationproblems, hasrecentlyseen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimi- tion (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings). It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name.

This book is the first comprehensive tutorial on matheuristics. Matheuristics are based on mathematical extensions of previously known heuristics, mainly metaheuristics, and on original, area-specific approaches. This tutorial provides a detailed discussion of both contributions, presenting the pseudocodes of over 40 algorithms, abundant literature references, and for each case a step-by-step description of a sample run on a common Generalized Assignment Problem example. C++ source codes of all algorithms are available in an associated SW repository.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2020, held online -due to COVID-19- in Barcelona Spain, in October 2020. The 20 full papers presented , together with 8 short papers and 5 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. ANTS 2020 contributions are dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, ANTS 2016, held in Brussels, Belgium, in September 2016. The 18 full papers and 7 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. They are devoted to the field of swarm intelligence as a whole, without any bias towards specific research directions.

Metaheuristics support managers in decision-making with robust tools that provide high-quality solutions to important applications in business, engineering, economics, and science in reasonable time frames, but finding exact solutions in these applications still poses a real challenge. However, because of advances in the fields of mathematical optimization and metaheuristics, major efforts have been made on their interface regarding efficient hybridization.

This edited book will provide a survey of the state of the art in this field by providing some invited reviews by well-known specialists as well as refereed papers from the second Matheuristics workshop to be held in Bertinoro, Italy, June 2008. Papers will explore mathematical programming techniques in metaheuristics frameworks, and especially focus on the latest developments in Mixed Integer Programming in solving real-world problems.