FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Special issue of the Journal of the Operational Research Society on
Heuristic Optimisation

Guest editors:
Uwe Aickelin (University of Nottingham) and Alistair Clark (University
of the West of England)

Submission Deadline:
30 June 2009

Heuristic Optimisation

A heuristic is a method which 'on the basis of experience or judgement
seems likely to yield a good solution to the problem, but cannot be
guaranteed to produce an optimum'. Although over the years there have
been some advances in exact optimisation, heuristics continue to be very
popular in the Operational Research community for a number of reasons:

(1) Computational complexity of problems.
(2) Problems may be ill-defined or data imprecise.
(3) The user may require several different solutions to make the final
choice.

The special issue aims to stimulate interest in the most current
developments in heuristics from the OR community. We are seeking novel,
high quality papers in, but not limited to,

* Real-world, complex or novel applications of heuristics, incl. case
studies and practical implementations
* New search operators or otherwise innovative heuristics
* Heuristics suitable for solving problems that contain uncertainty
* Improved or new models or other representations for hard optimisation
problems that facilitate heuristic methods
* Comparative studies on different heuristics for specific problems
* End-user interaction and interfacing

Papers should be submitted through the journal's online submission
system on the OR Society's website (www.orsoc.org.uk ) by clicking on
the 'Submit paper - JORS' button. Instructions for authors can be found
at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/. Please indicate that your
paper is being submitted to the Special issue on Heuristic Optimisation
by mentioning this on the 'explanation of the contribution' field on the
submission page.


Professor Uwe Aickelin,
School of Computer Science,
The University of Nottingham,
Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK.
tel: +44 (0)115 95 14215
e-mail: uwe.aickelin@nottingham.ac.uk

Dr. Alistair Clark,
Department of Mathematics and Statistics,
University of the West of England,
Bristol, BS16 1QY, England.
tel: +44 (0) 117 328 3134
e-mail: Alistair.Clark@uwe.ac.uk