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Metaheuristics has grown and continues to grow steadily. Seen both from the technical point of view and from the application-oriented side, these optimization tools have established their value in a remarkable story of success. Researchers have demonstrated the ability of these methods to solve hard combinatorial problems of practical sizes within reasonable computational time.

Highlighted in METAHEURISTICS: Progress in Complex Systems Optimization are the recent developments made in the area of Simulated Annealing, Path Relinking, Scatter Search, Tabu Search, Variable Neighborhood Search, Hyper-heuristics, Constraint Programming, Iterated Local Search, GRASP, bio-inspired algorithms like Genetic Algorithms, Memetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization or Swarm Intelligence, and several other paradigms. In addition, a series of tutorials on developing areas in Metaheuristics are presented in the volume. Giving these tutorials are some of the top researchers in Metaheuristics: Edmund Burke, Reuven Rubinstein, Eric Taillard, Gilles Pesant, Pierre Hansen, and Stefan Vo .

Applications addressed are anticipated to include production planning, machine and project scheduling, the traveling salesman and vehicle routing, packing, knapsack and location problems with layout design, portfolio selection, network-design, health care, energy and environmental planning, data mining, pattern classification and biotechnology, among others.

The aim of this book is to provide several different kinds of information: a delineation of general Metaheuristics methods, a number of state-of-the-art articles from a variety of well-known classical application areas as well as an outlook to modern computational methods in promising new areas. Therefore, this book may equally serve as a textbook in graduate courses for students, as a reference book for people interested in engineering or social sciences, and as a collection of new and promising avenues for researchers working in this field.