Editorial for the Special Issue on Combinatorial Optimization Problems

First paragraph: In combinatorial optimization, the goal is to find an optimal solution, according to some objective function, from a discrete search space. These problems arise widely in industry and academia and, unfortunately, many of them are NP-hard and no polynomial time algorithm can guarantee their solution to a certified optimality unless. Therefore, in the last decades researchers have investigated the use of stochastic search algorithms to find near optimal solutions to these problems. In particular, great research efforts have been devoted to the development and application of metaheuristic algorithms to solve combinatorial optimization problems