This special issue contains refereed extended papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Optimization and Applications (OPTIMA 2018), which was held on October 1–5, 2018, in Petrovac, Montenegro.
By tradition, the main organizers of the conference were Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, Montenegro, Dorodnicyn Computing Centre FRC CSC RAS, Russia, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia, and the University of Évora, Portugal.
Organized annually since 2009, the conference has attracted a significant number of researchers, scholars, and specialists around the World working in many fields of optimization, operations research, optimal control, game theory, and their numerous applications in practice, industry, data analysis, and software development.
The broad scope of OPTIMA has made it an event where researchers involved in different domains of optimization theory and numerical methods, investigating continuous and discrete extreme problems, designing heuristics and algorithms with theoretical bounds, developing optimization software and applying optimization techniques to highly relevant practical problems, can meet together and discuss their approaches and results.
This issue contains top-level papers on scheduling, optimal resource allocation and SAT problems, advanced method for continuous optimization, new insight on classic optimization problems.
We believe that all this facilitates cross-fertilization of ideas between scientists elaborating on the modern optimization theory and methods and employing them to valuable practical problems.
January, 2022