Call for Papers

 Journal of the Operational Research Society

Special Issue on Systems to Build Systems
Paper submission deadline: 1st of March, 2011

Guest Editors: Edmund K. Burke, Ender Özcan, Jonathan Thompson
The Journal of the Operational Research Society invites researchers to submit papers to the Special Issue on "Systems to Build Systems". Submissions should describe original unpublished work.

DESCRIPTION
The current state of the art in the development of decision support systems and search methodologies is focused around the human design of bespoke systems, which are specifically tailored to the problem solving environment in hand. Although such systems are often highly successful and useful, their development cost is often high due to the human (expert) resources required. Hence, an ever more important goal is to develop intelligent systems which are capable of automatically building (and/or selecting) other systems. Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in developing such -systems to build systems- to accomplish this challenging task. The ultimate aim is to raise the level of generality by providing a more broadly applicable solution, as opposed to dealing with single problems. These types of -systems to build systems- have the potential to significantly reduce the resource cost that is often associated with developing tailored systems, since the algorithm construction/selection part of the development process is automated.

The main purpose of this special issue is to reveal the recent advances in the field, including novel methodologies, their foundations, frameworks and applications to real-world problems.

SCOPE
Topics on the systems to build systems (e.g. hyper-heuristics) include (but not limited to):
  • new methodologies to build (and/or select) systems
  • automated (computer aided) design of heuristics (e.g., by genetic programming, grammatical evolution, etc.)
  • adaptive/self-tuning methodologies to build systems (e.g. evolutionary algorithms, multi-meme algorithms, adaptive operator selection, dynamic algorithm portfolios, reactive search, and others)
  • machine learning techniques to support/build systems (e.g. learning classifier systems, data mining, reinforcement learning, neural networks, and others)
  • fuzzy systems to build systems
  • applications and new challenging domains, particularly real-world problems
  • foundational studies towards the understanding of systems to build systems
  • classifications of methodologies
  • generality of the methodologies to build systems
  • scalability issues
  • issues in multi-objective, discrete and continuous methodologies to build systems
  • issues in comparison of systems to build systems over multiple problem domains
SUBMISSIONS
Papers should be submitted electronically via the Journal of the Operational Research Society's online submission system at http://jors.msubmit.net/, following the journal's instructions to authors at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/. Please indicate that your submission is to the Special Issue on "Systems to build systems" (by selecting this option as the article type). All papers submitted to the special issue will go through the normal strict peer review process of the Journal of the Operational Research Society to ensure the high quality of this volume.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline: 1st of March, 2011
Notification of acceptance: 1st of September, 2011

Please feel free to contact the guest editors if you have any questions.
Edmund K. Burke [>>]
University of Nottingham,
ekb [ATT] cs.nott.ac.uk
 Ender Özcan [>>]
University of Nottingham,
exo [ATT] cs.nott.ac.uk
 Jonathan Thompson [>>]
University of Cardiff,
ThompsonJM1 [ATT] cardiff.ac.uk