Nenad Mladenovic (editor) - Variable Neighborhood Search: 8th International Conference, ICVNS 2021, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, March 21–25, 2021, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12559)

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This volume edited by Nenad Mladenovi, Andrei Sleptchenko, Angelo Sifaleras, and Mohammed Omar contains peer-reviewed papers from the 8th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search (ICVNS 2021) held in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., during March 2125, 2021.

The conference follows previous successful meetings that were held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain (2005); Herceg Novi, Montenegro (2012); Djerba, Tunisia (2014); Malaga, Spain (2016); Ouro Preto, Brazil, (2017); Sithonia, Halkidiki, Greece (2018); Rabat, Marocco (2019).

This edition was organized by Nenad Mladenovi, Andrei Sleptchenko, and Mohammed Omar from Khalifa University (United Arab Emirates), together with Angelo Sifaleras, from the University of Macedonia (Greece).

Like its predecessors, the main goal of ICVNS 2021 was to provide a stimulating environment in which researchers coming from various scientific fields could share and discuss their knowledge, expertise, and ideas related to the VNS Metaheuristic and its applications. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ICVNS 2021 was organized in hybrid (online and offline) mode with the help of the Office of Marketing and Communications of Khalifa University.

The following three plenary lecturers shared their current research directions with the ICVNS 2021 participants:

Around 40 participants took part in the ICVNS 2021 conference, and a total of 27 papers were accepted for oral presentation. A total of 14 long papers were accepted for publication in this LNCS volume after thorough peer review by the members of the ICVNS 2021 Program Committee. These papers describe recent advances in methods and applications of Variable Neighborhood Search.

The editors thank all the participants in the conference for their contributions and for their continuous effort to disseminate VNS and are grateful to the reviewers for preparing excellent reports. The editors wish to acknowledge the Springer LNCS editorial staff for their support during the entire process of making this volume. Finally, we express our gratitude to the organizers and sponsors of the ICVNS 2021 meeting: