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, 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*).

Accepted papers will be published by Springer Nature in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. See the EvoCOP Conference Proceedings in SpringerLink.

The proceedings of EvoCOP 2021 are available following the link.

Download the CFP in PDF format from here.

Fast Track Publication in Evolutionary Computation Journal

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.

Conference Chairs

  • Christine Zarges
    Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
    chz8(at)aber.ac.uk
  • Sébastien Verel
    Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France
    verel(at)univ-littoral.fr

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 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.

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 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 (deadline in 3 February 2021). At least one author of each accepted work has to register for the conference not later than 19 February 2021, attend the conference and present the work.

Program Committee

Khulood Alyahya, University of Birmingham, UK
Alexander Brownlee, University of Stirling, UK
Maxim Buzdalov, ITMO University, Russia
Pedro Castillo, University of Granada, Spain
Josu Ceberio, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Francisco Chicano, University of Málaga, Spain
Carlos Coello Coello, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico
Carlos Cotta, University of Malaga, Spain
Bilel Derbel, CRIStAL (Univ. Lille), France
Karl Doerner, University of Vienna, Austria
Benjamin Doerr, Ecole Polytechnique, France
Carola Doerr, Sorbonne University, CNRS, France
Talbi El-Ghazali, University of Lille, France
Paola Festa, University of Napoli FEDERICO II, Italy
Carlos M. Fonseca, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Bernd Freisleben, University of Marburg, Germany
Marcos Diez García, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Carlos García-Martínez, University of Córdoba, Spain
Adrien Goeffon, LERIA – Universite d’Angers, France
Andreia Guerreiro, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Jin-Kao Hao, University of Angers, France
Bin Hu, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
Thomas Jansen, Aberystwyth University, UK
Andrzej Jaszkiewicz, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
Ayush Joshi, University of Bath, UK
Ahmed Kheiri, Lancaster University, UK
Mario Koeppen, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
Frederic Lardeux, LERIA – University of Angers, France
Rhydian Lewis, Cardiff University, UK
Arnaud Liefooghe, University of Lille, France
Manuel López-Ibáñez, The University of Manchester, UK
Jose A. Lozano, The University of the Basque Country, Spain
Gabriel Luque, University of Málaga, Spain
Basseur Matthieu, LERIA Angers, France
Juan Julián Merelo, University of Granada, Spain
Krzysztof Michalak, Wroclaw University of Economics, Poland
Nysret Musliu, TU Wien, Autria
Frank Neumann, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Gabriela Ochoa, University of Stirling, UK
Pietro S Oliveto, University Of Sheffield, UK
Beatrice Ombuki-Berman, Brock University, Department of Computer Science, Canada
Luis Paquete, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Mario Pavone, University of Catania, Italy
Paola Pellegrini, IFSTTAR, France
Francisco Pereira, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra, Portugal
Daniel Porumbel, CEDRIC, CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers), Paris, France
Jakob Puchinger, CentraleSupélec, IRT-SystemX, France
Abraham Punnen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Günther Raidl, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
María Cristina Riff, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Chile
Eduardo Rodriguez-Tello, Cinvestav-Tamaulipas, Mexico
Hana Rudová, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Valentino Santucci, University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy
Frédéric Saubion, LERIA – University of Angers, France
Patrick Siarry, Universit de Paris 12, France
Jim Smith, University of the West of England, UK
Thomas Stützle, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
Sara Tari, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France
Renato Tinós, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Nadarajen Veerapen, University of Lille, France
Sébastien Verel, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France
Carsten Witt, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Bing Xue, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Takeshi Yamada, NTT, Japan
Christine Zarges, Aberystwyth University, UK