Dear Colleagues,

Let me introduce the Algorithms Special Issue entitled "Novel Meta-heuristic Approaches and Their Applications to Preemptive Operational Planning and Logistics in Disaster Management". Nowadays, there is a generalized and ever-growing concern, across institutions and governments around the globe, with the increased frequency and scale of wide-area disasters, such as forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanos. Irrespective of whether these disasters originated from purely natural or human-induced factors, the reality is that more research on operational logistics is widely deemed critical for anticipatively reducing the fatal consequences of these events. In this context, despite the huge research efforts conducted toward predictive risk assessing techniques that focus on the aforementioned disaster events, there is a clear gap between such predictive approaches and the operational logistics that, upon their linkage, would bring about preemptive operations planning and/or logistics (i.e., logistics driven by a priori predictive information concerning the disaster situation at hand).

Bearing this scope in mind, the Special Issue will gravitate toward the use of advanced meta-heuristic optimization approaches as means of properly allocating human, technical, and transport resources based on predictive information concerning the locational severity of a disaster, its geographical probability of occurrence, etc. However, beyond novel algorithmic developments, the Special Issue is open to contributions dealing with conventional meta-heuristic algorithms (e.g., genetic, simulated annealing, PSO, etc.) that are applied, with an emphasis on their practicality, to innovative formulations of operational planning paradigms over wide areas. We hereby invite high quality papers presenting original research on this exciting topic.

Prof. Dr. Miren Nekane Bilbao
Prof. Dr. Sancho Salcedo-Sanz
Dr. Javier Del Ser Lorente
Dr. Sergio Gil-Lopez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Algorithms is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• disaster management
• meta-heuristic optimization
• predictive risk modeling
• forest fires
• earthquakes
• operational planning
• logistics