Featuring application-oriented and methodological perspectives alike, this book shows how metaheuristics have acquired a prominent role in supporting the decision-making processes of practitioners dealing with complex and highly varied real-world problems.

This volume is centered on exemplifying how metaheuristics have acquired a prominent role in supporting the decision making process of practitioners dealing with complex real-world problems arising in different fields and realms of application. The conference was centered on presenting original and innovative approaches dealing with metaheuristic algorithms from two broad perspectives: • Application oriented perspective: A large number of contributions can be labelled application oriented, since they present successful application of metaheuristics to real world problems arising in different fields; • Methodological perspective: In line with recent trends in metaheuristics, researchers have devoted a great deal of attention to the hows and whys of metaheuristics, studying, e.g., what is the impact of a given feature of a metaheuristic on the final performance of the algorithm, how to fine tune and calibrate a metaheuristic, how to properly design and combine neighborhoods and so forth. The conference was organized for the benefit of researchers and practitioners from 25 different countries. A total of 117 attendees were present for the conference in Hamburg. During the conference, a total of 94 presentations were given in these subject areas, representing both research and applications. Of these, 37 papers were submitted for publication in the post conference volume. These papers were peer reviewed, resulting in a select number of high quality papers that are represented in this volume. The organization of this volume follows the more general structure of the conference itself. The volume can be broadly divided into two main sections: Methodology and Applications. Within each chapter of the Methodology section, the reader is driven inside a metaheuristic, with the aim of grasping how and why a certain feature works, how neighborhoods can be effectively designed, combined, and implemented, how a metaheuristic should be fine-tuned, along with other methodological issues. The focus of these chapters lies more on the metaheuristic itself, as opposed to a more application oriented approach of the second part of the book. The second part of the book, Applications, presents a number of contributions that illustrate how metaheuristics have been successfully employed to tackle either classical problems from the literature or real-world problems from the industry.