NEO 2015

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and EvolutionaryOptimization (NEO) workshop held in September 2015 in Tijuana, Mexico. Thedevelopment of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance intoday's world that requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing numberof challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established andwidely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numericaloptimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Bothparadigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve somechallenging problems while still failing in others. The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together people from these and relatedfields to discuss, compare and merge their complimentary perspectives in orderto develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimizethe weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. Through this effort, we believe thatthe NEO can promote the development of new techniques that are applicable to abroader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequatetreatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect us allsuch as health care, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papersthe NEO 2015 that comprise this book make a contribution to this goal.