Matheuristics 2016

Sixth International Workshop on Model-based Metaheuristics

4-7 September 2016, Brussels, Belgium

News

The workshop proceedings are now available as IRIDIA Technical Report.

The workshop program is available. There are three invited speakers, Christian Blum (University of the Basque Country), Marco Lübbecke (RWTH AAchen University) and Kenneth Sörensen (University of Antwerp).

The informal get-together will be at the Greenwich café (7 rue des Chartreux, 1000 Bruxelles) on Sunday, from 18:00 to 20:00.

The gala dinner will instead be at La maison du cygne in Grand Place, on Monday from 19:30.

The Matheuristics workshop series is proposed as a primary forum for researchers working on exploiting mathematical programming techniques in a (meta)heuristic framework, granting to mathematical programming approaches the problem robustness and time effectiveness which characterize heuristics, or exploiting the mathematical programming model formulation in the customization of a heuristic for specific or general problems.

Metaheuristics such as tabu search, simulated annealing, GRASP, VNS, genetic algorithms and ant colonies, have been originally proposed and developed when the available Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) algorithms and software or Constraint Programming methods were not an efficient as today, nor even feasible alternative for solving real-world problem instances, or significant subproblems thereof.

However, research on mathematical programming, and in particular on discrete optimization, has led to a state of the art where MIP solvers or customized MIP codes can be effective even in a heuristic context, both as primary solvers or as subprocedures.

Matheuristics 2016 aims at collecting contributions that define the state of the art for the computational effectiveness and efficiency or the theoretical properties of «matheuristics», which are algorithms and codes that integrate (meta)heuristics and MIP strategies and software. The workshop will be entirely devoted to this subject of research and to its applications. The conference program will consist of plenary presentations, enriched by a couple of keynote or tutorial lectures. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- Model-based metaheuristics,
- Hybridizing (meta)heuristics and exact methods,
- MIP techniques used for defining heuristic solvers (such as local branching and RINS),
- Problem relaxations to guide (heuristic) search,
- Information from exact algorithms to develop heuristics,
- Decompositions and lower/upper bounds in matheuristic codes,
- Stochastic programming and heuristic search,
- Metaheuristics for stochastic problems,
- Design and configuration of matheuristic algorithms,
- Experimental analysis and modeling of algorithms,
- Real world case histories of matheuristic applications, and
- Automatic configuration of matheuristics and algorithm selection among others.

Although we do not discard their importance, Matheuristics 2016 is not interested in heuristics tailored to a specific problem that have no element which can be generalized to other problems (no matter how mathematically sophisticated they are) nor in metaheuristic variants or implementations that are not justified by a mathematical model.

Further information

Up-to-date information will be published on the web site iridia.ulb.ac.be/matheuristics2016. For information about local arrangements, registration forms, etc., please refer to the above-mentioned web site or contact the local organizers at the address below.

Matheuristics 2016 will be organized back-to-back with ANTS 2016, and the two conferences will share an invited talk and coffee breaks.

Workshop Location

Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management
Campus du Solbosch
Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Av. F.D. Roosevelt 42
1050 Brussels, Belgium.
See also the practical information page.

Important dates

Submission deadline	April 15, 2016
New submission deadline	May 4, 2016
Notification of acceptance	June 12, 2016
Camera ready copy	June 30, 2016
Early registration for authors	June 30, 2016
Workshop	September 4-7, 2016
Submission deadline ITOR special issue	October 15, 2016

Contact

Matheuristics WORKSHOP
IRIDIA-CoDE, CP 194/6
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Av. F. D. Roosevelt 50
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

Tel +32-2-6502729
Fax +32-2-6502715
iridia.ulb.ac.be/matheuristics2016
email: matheuristics@iridia.ulb.ac.be

Matheuristics website by Alberto Franzin. Header image cropped from this one. Last update: 2016.09.14