Editorial: Special issue: Applications of variable neighbourhood search
Nenad Mladenović, Belén Melián-Batista · IMA Journal of Management Mathematics · 2015
The number of scientific papers related to variable neighbourhood search (VNS) published in international journals has grown in the last 15 years from a few per year to hundreds. This impact has been due in part to the good results that VNS has achieved over a wide range of combinatorial and global optimization problems and to its accessibility to researchers in a large variety of research areas. This special issue on VNS brings together latest advances in the field, and it continues the tradition of special issues on VNS in the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics. The papers that appear in the issue were presented and discussed at the EURO Mini Conference XXVIII on VNS in Montenegro in October 2012. Since that date, thousands of papers on VNS have appeared in the literature. This growth does not appear to have diluted the interest in VNS, and papers continue to be well cited. For example, the 6 papers in the previous special issue in this journal on VNS (Belen & Mladenovic, 2007) have been cited 132 times in total, 22 citations per paper. De Paula et al. (2007) in particular has been cited 58 times.