Hoooooray! We are very happy to announce that there is a new doctor among us: Dr. Stefan Wagner, chief architect of the HeuristicLab optimization framework has successfully defended his theses titled Heuristic Optimization Software Systems - Modeling of Heuristic Optimization Algorithms in the HeuristicLab Software Environment and has received the title Doctor Technicae from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. In his presentation he compared existing software systems and showed the concepts that went into the development of the next generation HeuristicLab which we are going to release early next year to the public. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

At the same day, fellow researcher Prof. Günther Raidl from the Algorithm and Data structures group from the Vienna University of Technology gave a talk on metaheuristic hybridization at the FH OÖ's campus Hagenberg. Prof. Raidl showed interesting ways to combine metaheuristics and exact methods and presented two applications on which this combination has been very successful. His presentation can be found on the HeuristicLab website in the presentations section.