The 18th Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2025) will be held during November 28-30, 2025 in Tianjin, China. Original research papers in the areas of combinatorial optimization and its applications are solicited. In addition to theoretical results, we are particularly interested in submissions that report on experimental and applied research of general algorithmic interest. Special consideration will be given to research that is motivated by real-world problems. Experimental and applied papers are expected to show convincingly the usefulness and efficiency of the algorithms discussed in a practical setting.
The topics include, but are not limited to:
The submission should contain scholarly exposition of ideas, techniques, and results, including the motivation and a clear comparison with related work. The length of the submission should not exceed 12 pages in LNCS style (including references, but excluding the optional appendix). Springer’s proceedings LaTeX templates are available in Overleaf. Please make sure to hide all author-related information, we will conduct double-blind review process.
Submitted papers must describe work not previously published. They must not be submitted simultaneously to any other conference with refereed proceedings or to journals. We regard the following case as a simultaneous submission. Submission of drafts which contain the essentially same results from papers under review in other conferences or journals at the moment of the submission. Only electronic PDF submission will be allowed via the Springer Online Conference System. Please submit your paper at https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=cocoa2025. For the complete author guideline, please access Springer's official Springer_Instructions_for_Authors_of_Proceedings_CS.pdf .
The conference proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. After the conference, selected papers will be published in special issues of journals. Previous COCOA proceedings can be found through Previous COCOA Papers.
The Best Paper and the Best Student Paper will be awarded. A paper is eligible for the Best Student Paper if all authors are full-time students at the time of submission. To indicate that a submission is eligible, please add the phrase "Eligible for best student paper" as the last sentence in the "Abstract" field in the web form on the submission server as well as in the paper.