New developments in metaheuristics and their applications

This special issue emerged from contributions presented at the 10th Metaheuristics International Conference (MIC), held at the Singapore Management University in Singapore, August 5–8, 2013. The first MIC took place in Breckenridge, Colorado, USA in 1995. Due to its success, the conference was established as a bi-annual event that gained further attraction and grew in size steadily. Today, MIC has a long-standing international tradition and is for many researchers and practitioners working in the field of metaheuristics one of the leading scientific events to exchange with colleagues and meet friends. Following the tradition, MIC2013 invited extended abstracts as well as papers of up to 10 pages describing original yet unpublished scientific work related to metaheuristics. We received 86 submissions which have been reviewed by the Program Committee, finally yielding 25 accepted full papers and 34 extended abstracts thatwere scheduled to be presented at the conference and published in the conference proceedings (Lau et al. 2013). These contributions documented that the field of metaheuristics is many-fold. While a substantial portion of the papers focuses on applications in