The rst edition of the Handbook of Metaheuristics was published in 2003
under the editorship of Fred Glover and Gary A. Kochenberger. Given the
numerous - velopments observed in the eld of metaheuristics in recent
years, it appeared that the time was ripe for a second edition of the
Handbook. For different reasons, Fred and Gary were unable to accept
Springer's invitation to prepare this second e- tion and they suggested
that we should take over the editorship responsibility of the Handbook.
We are deeply honored and grateful for their trust. As stated in the rst
edition, metaheuristics are "solution methods that orch- trate an
interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level stra-
gies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and
performing a robust search of a solution space. " Although this broad
characterization still holds today, many new and exciting developments
and extensions have been observed in the last few years. We think in
particular to hybrids, which take advantage of the strengths of each of
their individual metaheuristic components to better explore the solution
space. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques,
like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint
programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications,
metaheuristics are now used to nd high-quality solutions to an
ever-growing number of complex, ill-de ned re- world problems, in
particular combinatorial ones.