Following the two BBOB GECCO workshops, we invite participants and other researchers to submit their original work on benchmarking optimizers for real-parameter black-box optimization for an ECJ special issue. Submissions can be extensions of works submitted at the workshops or new submissions. They should be original research which is not published nor currently under review by other journals or conferences.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• benchmarking results for new or not-so-new optimization algorithms (stochastic, deterministic, …) for noise-free problems and / or noisy problems
• comparison of optimization algorithms
• design of benchmarking procedures

Researchers are welcome to use the COCO software platform which can be found in the download page. Researchers are also provided with all data collected during BBOB 2009 and BBOB 2010.

• pdf of call for papers, the deadline is extended to end of September 2010
• General guidelines and style files for submissions. Further supporting material and an ECJ style template that also includes graphs and tables generated by the COCO tools can be downloaded.

Authors should submit their manuscripts until end of September to the Evolutionary Computation editorial manager at http://ecj.lri.fr. When submitting a manuscript, at the same time an email should be sent to Nikolaus Hansen (firstname.lastname@inria.fr) with copy to ecj@lri.fr mentioning the special issue, paper title and authors to confirm the submission.

Anne Auger, Nikolaus Hansen and Marc Schoenauer