EvoCOP 2025: Call for Papers

The 25th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation (EvoCOP) invites submissions on experimental and theoretical aspects of evolutionary computation and other metaheuristics applied to combinatorial optimization problems.

EvoCOP is part of the EvoStar event, held from April 23-25, 2025, in Trieste, Italy, alongside EuroGP, EvoMUSART, and EvoApplications.

Areas of Interest and Contributions

EvoCOP welcomes submissions in all experimental and theoretical aspects of evolutionary computation and other metaheuristics to combinatorial optimisation problems, including (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Applications of metaheuristics to combinatorial optimization problems
• Theoretical developments
• Neighbourhoods and efficient algorithms for searching them
• Variation operators for stochastic search methods
• Constraint-handling techniques
• Parallelisation and grid computing
• Search space and landscape analyses
• Comparisons between different (also exact) methods
• Automatic algorithm configuration and design

Prominent examples of metaheuristics include (but are not limited to):

• Evolutionary algorithms
• Estimation of distribution algorithms
• Swarm intelligence methods such as ant colony and particle swarm optimisation
• Artificial immune systems
• Local search methods such as simulated annealing, tabu search, variable neighbourhood search, iterated local search, scatter search and path relinking
• Hybrid methods such as memetic algorithms
• Matheuristics (hybrids of exact and heuristic methods)
• Hyper-heuristics and autonomous search
• Surrogate-model-based methods

Notice: By tradition, continuous/numerical optimisation is not part of the topics of interest of EvoCOP. Interested authors might consider submitting to other EvoStar conferences such as EvoApplications.

Submission Details

• Publication: Accepted papers will be published by Springer Nature in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
• Originality: Submissions must be original and not published elsewhere.
• Reviewing Process: Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The reviewing process will be double-blind, so please omit information about the authors in the submitted paper.
• Page Limits:
  • Short Papers: At most 6 pages of content (plus additional pages for references).
  • Full Papers: Between 7 and 14 pages of content (plus additional pages for references).
  • Short papers will receive a shorter presentation slot than full papers.
• Submission Instructions: Follow these instructions to submit a paper.

Important Dates

• EvoApplications Special Session Proposals: 8 September 2024
• Submission deadline: 1 November 2024 AoE (Extended to 15 November 2024 AoE)
• Notification to authors: 10 January 2025
• Camera-ready submission: 24 January 2025
• Author's mandatory registration: 26 February 2025
• Early registration deadline: 19 March 2025
• Late-Breaking Abstracts submission: 13 April 2025
• EvoStar Conference: 23-25 April 2025

Conference Chairs

• Markus Wagner: Monash University, Australia (markus.wagner(at)monash.edu)
• Martin Krejca: Ecole Polytechnique, France (martin.krejca(at)polytechnique.edu)