 | |
| Formation | 1987 |
|---|---|
| Legal status | Working group |
| Purpose | To promote combinatorial optimization |
Region | Europe |
Parent organization | Association of European Operational Research Societies |
| Website | ecco |
The European Chapter on Combinatorial Optimization (also, EURO Working Group on Combinatorial Optimization, or EWG ECCO) is a working group whose objective is to promote original research in the field of combinatorial optimization at the European level. [1] [2]
ECCO is one of the working groups of EURO, the Association of European Operational Research Societies. The Group was founded in 1987 by Catherine Roucairol, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, and Dominique de Werra.
The group is managed by an Advisory Board of 4 members and a Coordinator. The Advisory Board is currently composed of Jacek Błażewicz, Van Dat Cung, Alain Hertz, and Paolo Toth. The current coordinator is Silvano Martello. [3]
The group is suitable for people who are presently engaged in Combinatorial Optimization, either in theoretical aspects or in business, industry or public administration applications. Currently (2022), the group has over 1,600 members from 75 countries.
ECCO holds conferences on a regular basis (once a year during Spring). An abstract booklet is distributed to the participants at each meeting.
In most cases, the annual conference is followed by a peer reviewed special issue of an international journal, presenting a selection of the contributions presented at the meeting. Recent special issues appeared on Annals of Operations Research , [4] Optimization, [5] Journal of Scheduling, [6] Discrete Applied Mathematics, [7] [8] [9] [10] and Journal of Combinatorial Optimization. [11]
A newsletter is emailed to all members every three months.
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" rather than "continuous". Objects studied in discrete mathematics include integers, graphs, and statements in logic. By contrast, discrete mathematics excludes topics in "continuous mathematics" such as real numbers, calculus or Euclidean geometry. Discrete objects can often be enumerated by integers; more formally, discrete mathematics has been characterized as the branch of mathematics dealing with countable sets. However, there is no exact definition of the term "discrete mathematics".
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures.
Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects, where the set of feasible solutions is discrete or can be reduced to a discrete set. Typical combinatorial optimization problems are the travelling salesman problem ("TSP"), the minimum spanning tree problem ("MST"), and the knapsack problem. In many such problems, such as the ones previously mentioned, exhaustive search is not tractable, and so specialized algorithms that quickly rule out large parts of the search space or approximation algorithms must be resorted to instead.
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Immanuel Bomze is an Austrian mathematician. In his Ph.D. thesis, he completely classified all possible flows of the generalized Lotka–Volterra dynamics on the plane, employing equivalence of this dynamics to the 3-type replicator equation.
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Laurence Alexander Wolsey is an English mathematician working in the field of integer programming. He is a former president and research director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the engineering school of the same university.
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EWG EU/ME, the EURO Working Group on Metaheuristics, formerly referred to as EU/ME – the metaheuristics community, is a working group the main purpose of which is to provide a platform for communication among researchers in the field of metaheuristic optimization, practitioners interested in applying metaheuristic optimization techniques in practice, developers of optimization software, and the general public.
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Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).
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Paolo Toth is an Italian scientist and engineer, and an Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at the University of Bologna. He is known for his research on Operations Research and Mathematical Programming, his main contributions are the design and implementation of effective exact and heuristic algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Theory problems.
Tamás Terlaky is a Hungarian-Canadian-American professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University. He is especially well known for his work on criss-cross algorithms, interior-point methods, Klee-Minty examples for path following algorithms, and optimization.
Shmuel Onn is a mathematician, Professor of Operations Research and Dresner Chair at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He is known for his contributions to integer programming and nonlinear combinatorial optimization.