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History

Past EU/MEetings

EU/ME organizes a yearly EU/MEeting, a successful series of workshops.It is usually dedicated to a specific theme and done in association with a local research group or research partner.

  1. EU/MEeting 2001 with UK Local Search Group (London, UK).
  2. EU/MEeting 2002 on Multi-Objective Metaheuristics (Paris, France).
  3. EU/MEeting 2003 on Real-Life Applications of Metaheuristics (Antwerp, Belgium).
  4. EU/MEeting 2004 on Design and Evaluation of Advanced Hybrid Meta-Heuristics (Nottingham, UK).
  5. EU/MEeting 2005 on Metaheuristics and Large Scale Optimization (Vilnius, Lithuania).
  6. EU/MEeting 2006 on Combination of Metaheuristics and LS with Constraint Programming techniques (Nantes, France).
    EU/MEeting 2006 on Adaptive, Self-adaptive and Multi-level Metaheuristics (Málaga, Spain).
  7. EU/MEeting 2007 on Applications of Metaheuristics in the Service Industry (Stuttgart, Germany).
  8. EU/MEeting 2008 on Metaheuristics in Logistics and Routing (Troyes, France).
  9. EU/MEeting 2009 on Discussing the future (Porto, Portugal).
  10. EU/MEeting 2010 on the 10th anniversary of the metaheuristic community (Lorient, France).
  11. EU/MEeting 2011 on Client-centered Logistics and International Aid (Vienna, Austria).
  12. EU/MEeting 2012 on Metaheuristics for global challenges, Copenhagen, Denmark.
  13. EU/MEeting 2013  on Metaheuristics for all, Hamburg, Germany.
  14. EU/MEeting 2014 on Metaheuristics and Engineering, Istanbul, Turkey.
  15. EU/MEeting 2014 in memory of late Professor Arne Løkketangen, Molde, Norway.
  16. EU/MEeting 2015 on Metaheuristic Applications, Madrid, Spain.
  17. EU/MEeting 2016 on Design and Analysis of Metaheuristics, Antwerp, Belgium.
  18. EU/MEeting 2017 on Metaheuristics for a better world, Rome, Italy.
  19. EU/MEeting 2018 on Metaheuristics for industry, Geneva, Switzerland.

Important dates and events in the EU/ME history

  • 2000 – Creation of EU/ME – The EUropean chapter on MEtaheuristics
  • 2001 – Official endorsement within EURO
  • 2001 – First web site and already 500 members are counted
  • 2004 – The number of members reaches 1000. EURO is forced to set new rules to handle big groups.
  • 2007 – EU/ME website is upgraded and run under a CMS
  • 2010 – Change of the name to EU/ME the metaheuristics community
  • 2013 – Creation of a VNS section

Creation of the EURO Working Group EU/ME

On March 4-18, 2000, EURO organised a EURO Winter Institute on “Metaheuristics in Combinatorial Optimisation” in Lac Noir, Switzerland. Both for the participants and the organisers (Alain Hertz and Marino Widmer), it was a great success. During the Winter Institute, seventeen young researchers worked together and shared experiences for fifteen days. This resulted in a group of seventeen motivated young researchers, eager to continue their joint work in their future careers. The organisers, Alain Hertz and Marino Widmer, and also Manuel Laguna, encouraged the participants to create a EURO working group, to stimulate ongoing co-operation in this field of research.


The topic of the Winter Institute was “Metaheuristics in Combinatorial Optimisation”. It was decided to create a new group working in the field of metaheuristics to allow us to include people that use and develop metaheuristics for other than combinatorial optimisation problems.

In Europe and around the world, there exists already a large community working on that subject. The MIC (Metaheuristics International Conference) conference that takes place every two years, is a great success each time. EMO (International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimisation), EuroGP 2001 (4th European Conference on Genetic Programming Congress on Evolution

In Europe and around the world, there exists already a large community working on that subject. The MIC (Metaheuristics International Conference) conference that takes place every two years, is a great success each time. EMO (International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimisation), EuroGP 2001 (4th European Conference on Genetic Programming Congress on Evolutionary Computation), GECCO 2001 (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) and CEC 2001 (Congress on Evolutionary Computation) are other recent conferences in that field. Many workshops and streams in conferences or workshops are dedicated to metaheuristics. Also, mailing lists are growing and the modern-heuristics mailing list is one of the most important today. Moreover, the Journal of Heuristics provides an outlet for the work done by researchers in the field of metaheuristics.

Marc Sevaux, Kenneth Sörensen and Christelle Wynants decided to found a working group on metaheuristics to provide a forum for researchers, to intensify the joint European research and to maintain complete and updated information about events, papers, surveys, new algorithms, free positions, etc. One of the first acts of this new working group was to create a comprehensive web site of metaheuristics-related topics.

In January 2001, the EU/ME working group was officially endorsed by EURO and given the status of EURO working group. Since then, the group has continued to increase its member base.

Pictures from the EURO Winter Institute on Metaheuristics and Combinatorial Optimization