Preface to the Special Issue on Matheuristics and Metaheuristics

• Published date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/itor.12702
• Date: 01 January 2020

Intl. Trans. in Op. Res. 27 (2020) 5–8

DOI: 10.1111/itor.12702

INTERNATIONAL

TRANSACTIONS

IN OPERATIONAL

RESEARCH

Preface to the Special Issue on Matheuristics

and Metaheuristics

This special issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research focus es on Matheuristics

and Metaheuristics and is the largest published to date, highlighting the importance of the field and

the broad scope of these methods and the reach of their applications.

Academicians and practitioners responded with enthusiasm to three parallel calls for papers,

each of them focusing on a different theme, but all related to approximate methods to solve opti-

mization problems: Matheuristics, Metaheuristics, and Variable Neighborhood Search. More than

120 articles were submitted and handled by the Guest Editors.

After several roundsof refereeing and the conclusion of the peer review procedure, the 28 accepted

articles appear in this special issue. In order to make it clear that they are all correlated and to better

illustrate the cross-fertilization between the themes of this special issue, these articles appear in the

alphabetical order of the last name of their first authors, and not in separate clusters. Many (or

most) articles in this issue could certainly fit in more than one of the themes that motivated the

three original calls for papers.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Guest Editors of this special issue—who are named

here in alphabetical order:Christian Blum, Angel Juan, Vittorio Maniezzo, Nenad Mladenovi´

c, He-

lena Ramalhinho, Angelo Sifaleras, Kenneth S¨

orensen, Marcone Souza, and Thomas St¨

utzle—for

their support and their commitment to this project. I would like also to join the Guest Editors to

acknowledge the hard work put in by the referees in the revision of all submitted papers. Last, but

certainly not least, all Editors would like to thank the Authors for their contribution to this special

issue, which would not exist without their high quality work. We sincerely believe that the readers

will enjoy reading these articles.

Celso C. Ribeiro

General Editor

Short preface – Matheuristics

Matheuristics are methods that exploit mathematical programming techniques in heuristic and

metaheuristic frameworks, granting to mathematical programming approaches the problem robust-

ness and time effectiveness thatcharacterize heuristics, or exploiting the mathematical programming

C

2019 The Authors.

International Transactionsin Operational Research C

2019 International Federation ofOperational Research Societies

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA02148,

USA.