Preface

This special issue is a collection of selected papers presented at the 7th International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA 7), which took place from December 12-15, 2007 in Kobe, Japan. ICOTA is an official conference series of POP (The Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group) and ICOTA 7 was organized by the Institute of Intelligent Information and Communications Technology (IICT) of Konan University. The purpose of this tri-annual conference is to provide a forum for international researchers and practitioners to highlight their major advances in optimization techniques and applications since ICOTA 6 held in December, 2004 in Ballarat, Australia.
Over two hundred papers were presented at ICOTA 7. The thirteen papers published in this special issue cover a wide range of topics in optimization techniques and their applications, as outlined below.

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