The 20th 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 2020 conference will be held in the city of Seville, Spain, together with EuroGP (the 23rd European Conference on Genetic Programming), EvoMUSART (the 9th European conference on evolutionary and biologically inspired music, sound, art and design) and EvoApplications (the 23rd 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 https://link.springer.com/conference/evocop for previous proceedings.)

The proceedings of EvoCOP 2020 are available online following the link. (NEW!)

The best regular paper presented at EvoCOP 2020 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.

Download the EvoCop 2020 flyer (PDF)

Conference Chairs

  • Luís Paquete
    University of Coimbra, Portugal
    paquete(at)dei.uc.pt
  • Christine Zarges
    Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
    chz8(at)aber.ac.uk

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 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.

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/conferences/?conf=evo2020

Best Paper Candidates

  • Benjamin Doerr and Martin S. Krejca.
    The Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm Copes Well With Deception and Epistasis.
  • Nikolaus Frohner, Bernhard Neumann and Günther Raidl.
    A Beam Search Approach to the Traveling Tournament Problem.
  • Hugo Monzón, Hernán Aguirre, Sébastien Verel, Arnaud Liefooghe, Bilel Derbel and Kiyoshi Tanaka. Dynamic Compartmental Models for Large Multi-objective Landscapes and Performance Estimation.

Programme Committee

  • Richard Allmendinger, University of Manchester, UK
  • Marco Baioletti, University of Perugia, Italy
  • Matthieu Basseur, University of Angers, France
  • Christian Blum, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Bellaterra, Spain
  • Sandy Brownlee, University of Stirling, UK
  • Maxim Buzdalov, ITMO University, Russia
  • Arina Buzdalova, ITMO University, Russia
  • Josu Ceberio, University of the Basque Country, Spain
  • Marco Chiarandini, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
  • Francisco Chicano, University of Málaga, Spain
  • Carlos Coello Coello, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico
  • Carlos Cotta, University of Málaga, Spain
  • Bilel Derbel, University of Lille, France
  • Karl Doerner, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
  • Benjamin Doerr, LIX-Ecole Polytechnique, France
  • Carola Doerr, CNRS and Sorbonne University, France
  • Paola Festa, Universitá di Napoli Federico II, Italy
  • Carlos M. Fonseca, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Carlos Garcia-Martinez, University of Córdoba, Spain
  • Adrien Goeffon, University of Angers, France
  • Andreia Guerreiro, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  • Jin-Kao Hao, University of Angers, France
  • Rudová Hana, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
  • Geir Hasle, SINTEF Digital, Norway
  • Bin Hu, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
  • Thomas Jansen, Aberystwyth University, UK
  • Andrzej Jaszkiewicz, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
  • Ahmed Kheiri, Lancaster University, UK
  • Mario Koeppen, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
  • Timo Kötzing, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany
  • Frederic Lardeux, University of Angers, France
  • Rhyd Lewis, Cardiff University, UK
  • Arnaud Liefooghe, University of Lille, France
  • Andrei Lissovoi, University of Sheffield, UK
  • Manuel López-Ibáñez, University of Manchester, UK
  • Jose Antonio Lozano, University of the Basque Country, Spain
  • Gabriel Luque, University of Málaga, Spain
  • Krzysztof Michalak, University of Economics, Wroclaw, Poland
  • Alberto Moraglio, University of Exeter, UK
  • Christine L. Mumford, Cardiff University, UK
  • Nysret Musliu, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
  • Frank Neumann, University of Adelaide, Australia
  • Gabriela Ochoa, University of Stirling, UK
  • Pietro Oliveto, University of Sheffield, UK
  • Beatrice Ombuki-Berman, Brock University, Canada
  • Luís Paquete, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Mario Pavone, University of Catania, Italy
  • Paola Pellegrini, French institute of science and technology for transport, France
  • Francisco B. Pereira, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Daniel Porumbel, CNAM, France
  • Jakob Puchinger, SystemX-Centrale Supélec, France
  • Günther Raidl, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
  • María Cristina Riff, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile
  • Marcus Ritt, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
  • Eduardo Rodriguez-Tello, CINVESTAV – Tamaulipas, Mexico
  • Andrea Roli, Università di Bologna, Italy
  • Peter Ross, Edinburgh Napier University, UK
  • Valentino Santucci, University of Perugia, Italy
  • Frederic Saubion, University of Angers, France
  • Patrick Siarry, University of Paris-Est Creteil, France
  • Kevin Sim, Edinburgh Napier University, UK
  • Jim Smith, University of the West of England, UK
  • Dirk Sudholt, University of Sheffield, UK
  • Thomas Stützle, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
  • El-ghazali Talbi, University of Lille, France
  • Sara Tari, University of Lille, France
  • Renato Tinós, University of São Paulo, Brazil
  • Nadarajen Veerapen, University of Lille, France
  • Sebastien Verel, Université du Littoral Cote d’Opale, France
  • Markus Wagner, University of Adelaide, Australia
  • Darrell Whitley, Colorado State University, USA
  • Carsten Witt, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
  • Takeshi Yamada, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
  • Christine Zarges, Aberystwyth University, UK