The 21st European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation is a multidisciplinary conference that brings together researchers working on applications and theory of evolutionary computation methods and other metaheuristics for solving difficult combinatorial optimisation problems appearing in various industrial, economic, and scientific domains.

Successfully solved problems include, but are not limited to, multi-objective, uncertain, dynamic and stochastic problems in the context of scheduling, timetabling, network design, transportation and distribution, vehicle routing, stringology, graphs, satisfiability, energy optimisation, cutting, packing, planning and search-based software engineering.

The EvoCOP 2021 conference will be held in the city of Seville, Spain, and online together with EuroGP (the 24th European Conference on Genetic Programming), EvoMUSART (the 10th European conference on evolutionary and biologically inspired music, sound, art and design) and EvoApplications (the 24th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation), in a joint event collectively known as EvoStar (Evo*). In 2021, EvoStar will be a hybrid conference!

Accepted papers will be published by Springer Nature in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. (See https://link.springer.com/conference/evocop for previous proceedings.)

Download the CFP in PDF format:
http://www.evostar.org/2021/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/evo2021_tracks_flyers_evocop.pdf

The best regular paper presented at EvoCOP 2021 will be distinguished with a Best Paper Award. Authors nominated for the best regular paper award will be invited for fast track publication in the Evolutionary Computation journal (MIT Press). The invited submissions must significantly extend the conference paper and will undergo peer review.


**** 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 optimisation 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 that, 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 ****

Paper submissions must be original and not published elsewhere. The submissions will be peer reviewed by members of the program committee. The reviewing process will be double-blind, please omit information about the authors in the submitted paper. Submit your manuscript in Springer LNCS format:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Page limit: 16 pages

Submission link: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=evo2021

The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the basis of the reviewers’ comments and will be asked to send a camera-ready version of their manuscripts. At least one author of each accepted work has to register for the conference, attend the conference and present the work.


**** EvoCOP Programme Chairs ****

Sébastien Verel
Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (ULCO), France
verel@univ-littoral.fr

Christine Zarges
Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
c.zarges@aber.ac.uk