Scatter Search - Wellsprings and Challenges

I came up with the idea of editing this volume in the summer of 2002 while working on the book "Scatter search methodologies and implementations in C" with Manuel Laguna in the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, Fred Glover kindly let me use his office, where I found a copy of the "Tabu Search Methods for Optimization" special issue that he edited in 1988 for the European Journal of Operational Research. This encounter made me realize that Scatter Search has reached a level of maturity as an optimization method that has parallels with what Tabu Search was experiencing in the late eighties. So I thought that the moment was perfect to embark on this project, which has been supported enthusiastically by Professor Roman Slowinski.