The HeuristicLab team would like to wish everyone a happy new year! By the end of this month we will be starting to release the next major version of HeuristicLab on this website and looking forward to hear about your experience in using HeuristicLab for teaching and about your innovative research results! We would be glad to get to know our users and the great things they are doing with HeuristicLab.

Heureka researcher Andreas Beham is attending the Winter Simulation Conference 2009 in Austin, Texas this week. The Winter Simulation Conference is among the premier international conferences on system simulation and Andreas is using the opportunity to network with other researchers and to present recent research results on facility layout optimization .

voestalpine Stahl GmbH invited the Heureka! project consortium to Linz for a retrospection on the first year of the centre. The meeting commenced at 3:00 p.m. with an exciting tour of the voestalpine Stahlwelt exhibition, followed by presentations and a buffet. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

1. Research group head Michael Affenzeller summarized accomplishments of the first year and introduced the research branches.
2. Gabriel Kronberger presented new approaches for the evaluation of complex process models.
3. Stephan Winkler showed intermediate results on th...