Dear scheduling researcher, We are delighted to announce the talk given by Christian Blum (IIIA-CSIC). The title is "CMSA: A Hybrid Metaheuristic for Combinatorial Optimization". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, February 18 at 14:00 UTC. Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/91528778001?pwd=OD4EuDE8dPNHhXoYQqPJbamPCaEf3D.1 Meeting ID: 915 2877 8001 Passcode: 474863 You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A The abstract follows. Construct, Merge, Solve & Adapt (CMSA) is an award-winning, hybrid algorithm for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. The main idea consists in the iterated application of an exact solver - such as an integer linear programming (ILP) solver - to sub-instances of the original problem instance. These sub-instances are enlarged at each iteration by adding solution components from a set of valid solutions that are obtained either by probabilistic solution construction or by any other means. Moreover, seemingly useless (or even harmful) solution components are removed. In this talk, an introduction to CMSA will be given, in addition to describing some of the most recent research lines around this technique. The next talk in our series will be: Helmut Simonis (Insight Centre, UCC) | March 4 | Constraint Based Scheduling: A User Perspective. For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/ With kind regards Zdenek Hanzalek, Michael Pinedo and Guohua Wan -- Zdenek Hanzalek Industrial Informatics Department, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/