Preface to Hybrid Metaheuristics - 6th International Workshop, HM 2009

The International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics was established with the aim of providing researchers and scholars with a forum for discussing new ideas and research on metaheuristics and their integration with techniques typical of other fields. The papers accepted for the sixth workshop confirm that such a combination is indeed effective and that several research areas can be put together. Slowly but surely, this process has been promoting productive dialogue among researchers with different expertise and eroding barriers between research areas. The papers in this volume give a representative sample of current research in hybrid metaheuristics. It is worth emphasizing that this year, a large number of papers demonstrated how metaheuristics can be integrated with integer linear programming and other operations research techniques. Constraint programming is also featured, which is a notable representative of artificial intelligence solving methods. Most of these papers are not only a proof of concept – which can be valuable by itself – but also show that the hybrid techniques presented tackle difficult and relevant problems.