Guidelines for the use of meta-heuristics in combinatorial optimization

the 18th EURO Summer/Winter Institute (ESWI XVIII) took place during the spring 2000 in Switzerland. The topic of ESWI XVIII, “Meta-heuristics in Combinatorial Optimization”, was selected due to its great current scientific interest: indeed, in recent years, several meta-heuristics have proved to be highly efficient for the solution of difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The Institute was focused more particularly on the development and the use of local search and population search algorithms. Applications of these meta-heuristics on academic or real life problems were also discussed.