*CALL FOR PAPERS * *http://antares.sip.ucm.es/~fernando/jsit/cfp.htm http://antares.sip.ucm.es/~fernando/jsit/cfp.htm*
*A Special Issue of the Journal of Systems and Information Technology on Optimisation Solutions in Systems*
*Aims and Scope*
Optimisation is a major necessity in Science and Engineering. No matter if we want to reduce the amount of needed resources to perform a task or maximize the output of some process, so often the difficulty of making the right decisions can be rephrased as some kind of optimisation problems. Unfortunately, for many optimisation problems finding the optimal solution is not feasible in general due to the hardness of the problem —moreover, for some of them we cannot even guarantee any constant ratio between the quality of the optimal solution and the quality of any solution found in reasonable time. Despite these disheartening theoretical limits, optimisation problems appear whenever there is a sophisticated system, so we do have to face them by some means —necessarily non-exhaustive methods. Some of these methods are specific to the problem under consideration, whereas others are adaptations of general optimization heuristics (metaheuristics) to the studied problem. Typically, the latter search for solutions similar to the most promising observed ones, or their combinations, for example by making some simple entities interact with each other according to simple rules and collaboratively construct new solutions. Within this category we can find evolutionary computation methods and swarm optimization methods, which are sometimes inspired by some natural process. Regardless of the method selected to tackle a hard optimization problem, the difficulty of the problem and the performance of the best known heuristics for the problem may have a high impact on the application field the problem belongs to, since the difficulty of a scientific or engineering process can be, to some extent, due to the computational difficulty of the underlying optimization problem it implicitly poses. The goal of this special issue is to introduce new research, or comprehensive compilations of existing ones, on optimisation techniques for engineering systems, and their applications.
*We solicit contributions related, but not limited to the following topics:*
· New optimisation algorithms and metaheuristics, enhancement of existing ones
· Problem-specific and generic optimisation methods
· Comparison of optimisation algorithms and metaheuristics
· Nature inspired metaheuristics, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence
· Classification and generalization of metaheuristics, hybridisation of methods
· Optimisation problems on real data, case studies
· Benchmark usage and generation
· Optimisation hardness, complexity of problems and optimisation algorithms
· Impact of the optimisation difficulty on Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Engineering
· Comprehensive compilations of the state of art on any aspect of optimisation
We encourage submissions from both academics and practitioners.
*Submission Procedure*
Full papers should be submitted to:
*http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsit* http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsit (all manuscripts should follow the submission guidelines available at http://emeraldgrouppublishing. com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=jsit
You must first create an author account in the system if you do not have one. Once registered, you will see the Author Centre button when you sign in to your account. Click on the ‘click here to submit a new manuscript’ link, which will take you through to the Manuscript Submission page. Follow the instructions to complete all fields and browse to upload your manuscript. At the ‘please select the issue you are submitting to’ dropdown list (under Details & Comments) please choose *“Special Issue on Optimisation Solutions in Systems”*.
*Important dates:*
· Please submit papers on or before October 1st 2017. All submissions will be peer-reviewed following the review process of the Journal of Systems and Information Technology. (Prospective authors are encouraged to indicate their interests any time before the submission deadline. Please, contact fernando@sip.ucm.es)
· Notification of results: December 15th 2017.
· Final submission: January 31st 2018. · The special issue will be published in June 2018
Special Issue Guest Editors:
Dr. Pablo Rabanal, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Dr. Ismael Rodríguez, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Dr. Fernando Rubio, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain