Journal of Global Optimization - Special issue on Variable neighborhood search.

Guest Editors: Emilio Carrizosa (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain); Pierre Hansen (GERAD and École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Canada); José A. Moreno (Universidad de la Laguna, Spain).

Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) is a metaheuristic which has shown to be very successful for solving hard combinatorial and global optimization problems.

During the EURO Mini-Conference on VNS took place in Herceg Novi, Montenegro, October 4th-7th 2012, researchers all around the world presented their most recent findings on VNS, either from a methodological viewpoint or as applications to real world problems.

Authors of papers presented at the EURO Mini-Conference on VNS are especially encouraged to submit their work to this special issue in the Journal of Global Optimization. However, the issue is open to all researchers who can contribute to a better knowledge of VNS.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Theory and Methodology:

* Theoretical or empirical analysis of VNS

* New variants of deterministic and stochastic VNS

* Continuous global VNS

*

Mat-heuristics and VNS

* Formulation space VNS

* Multi-objective VNS

*

Parallel VNS

* VNS hybrids

Applications:

* Mixed integer programming

*

Graphs, communication networks

* Clustering, data mining, location

*

Inventory, routing, supply chains

* Packing and covering

* Discovery sciences

* Other real world problems

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journals Author Guidelines. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal’s editorial manager http://jogo.edmgr.com/ and specifying that their paper is for the special issue “SI: VNS 2012″.

Submision deadline: 31-01-2013