The 11th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search (ICVNS 2025) was held from May 12 to 14, 2025, at HEC Montréal, Canada. Jointly organized within the Journées de l’Optimisation by CIRRELT, the conference brought together researchers and practitioners in the fields of optimization, heuristics, and metaheuristics, with a special focus on Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS).

ICVNS 2025 featured keynote talks, technical sessions, and discussions on recent developments in combinatorial and global optimization, machine learning, logistics, scheduling, and more. This edition paid tribute to the late Professor Pierre Hansen, co-founder of VNS, whose legacy continues to inspire the optimization community.

Submission Guidelines

The proceedings of ICVNS 2025 are intended for publication in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer.

To be eligible for inclusion in the LNCS volume, authors must meet the following requirements:

• Accepted Abstract: The author must have an abstract accepted for presentation at the ICVNS 2025 conference.
• Full Paper Submission: Authors are invited to submit full papers presenting original research contributions, theoretical advancements, or significant applications related to Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and associated metaheuristics.
• Length: Manuscripts should be between 12 and 15 pages, including references and appendices.
• Formatting: Submissions must strictly adhere to the Springer Instructions for Authors of Papers to be Published in Computer Science Proceedings.
  • Instructions for proceedings authors
  • LaTeX2e Proceedings Templates download
  • Microsoft Word Proceedings Templates

Only papers that comply with these guidelines will be considered for publication.

Program Committee

• Daniel Aloise, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
• Sergio Cavero, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Eduardo G. Pardo, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Angelo Sifaleras, University of Macedonia, Greece