Preface

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2021, held as part of Evo*2021, as Virtual Event, in April 2021, co-located with the Evo*2021 events: EvoMUSART, EvoApplications, and EuroGP.
The 14 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. They cover a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from the foundations of evolutionary algorithms and other search heuristics to their accurate design and application to combinatorial optimization problems. Fundamental and methodological aspects deal with runtime analysis, the structural properties of fitness landscapes, the study of core components of metaheuristics, the clever design of their search principles, and their careful selection and configuration. Applications cover problem domains such as scheduling, routing, search-based software engineering and general graph problems. The range of topics covered in this volume reflects the current state of research in the fields of evolutionary computation and combinatorial optimization.