9th International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization

Korumar Ephesus Beach & Spa Resort

One of the favourite holiday destinations in the Aegean, KoruMar Ephesus Beach & SPA Resort offers an amazing experience for families with children and those want to have fun with their friends. The hotel opens the doors to an unforgettable holiday with its restaurants offering delicious flavours, bars where fabulous cold and hot drinks are served, 4.000 m² outdoor pool, magnificent beach, aquaparks for both adults and kids, SPA Centre, fitness centre and many more.

Address: Yılancı Burnu Mevkii, Korumar Hotels, 09400 Kuşadası, Aydın, Turkey

Located 2 km from the centre of Kuşadası, 70 km from Izmir Adnan Menderes Airport, and 20 km from the ancient city of Ephesus.

All-inclusive concept

Educational Opportunity for Young Researchers

The ISCO 2026 will be preceded by a Spring School on May 4 and May 5, 2026, providing an excellent educational opportunity for the graduated students and researchers interested in combinatorial optimization.

Lectures will be delivered by experts in the field, making significant contributions to the academic careers of participants.

Topics: Packing and Covering

Lecturers: Gerard Cornuéjols and Ahmad Abdi

Each expert will teach 8 hours in one day.

Packing and covering problems are at the heart of combinatorial optimization. In a series of six 2-hour lectures and two 2-hour exercise sessions, we introduce objects sitting at the heart of many min-max theorems in combinatorial optimization, namely, totally unimodular and balanced matrices, perfect graphs, and ideal clutters. We also present recent advances in the area that have brought us closer to settling important conjectures in the area. These include the first constant-factor relaxation of Woodall's conjecture, a polyhedral proof Lovasz' matching lattice theorem, and exponential lower bounds for cube-ideal set-systems, amongst others. In addition to covering classical topics in packing and covering, a key goal of the summer school is to discuss new perspectives and to present new open problems for PhD students to work on.

The conference welcomes talks presenting results in all areas of combinatorial optimization and its applications. Each talk must be submitted following the instructions on this web. Each submission will be evaluated (accepted or rejected) by members of the Program Committee. ISCO2026 admits two types of submissions:

Extended abstracts (up to 4 pages): The submission deadline is 30 January 2026 before 23:59 (CET). Accepted "extended abstracts" in LNCS style will be published online on the conference website (and will not be included in the LNCS issue). However, extended abstracts will have the opportunity to be published in a post-conference Special Issue of the journal "Discrete Applied Mathematics".

Regular papers (up to 12 pages without Appendix): The submission deadline is 15 January 2026 before 23:59 (CET). Accepted "regular papers" will be published by Springer in a LNCS issue. For an accepted "regular paper" to be included in the LNCS issue, it should be presented at the conference by one of the authors who has to complete the conference registration (pay) before 15 March 2026. It is not allowed to submit a "regular paper" that has been submitted to a journal or another conference with proceedings published before the ISCO 2026 notification date. The authors of "regular papers" will have to prepare their camera-ready version two weeks after the end of ISCO 2026. Please, read the Guidelines. Submissions not following these guidelines will not be considered. Each submission will be reviewed by three anonymous reviewers. The main acceptance criteria are the quality and originality of the results and their relevance to the community. A "regular paper" submission will not be considered in any of the following cases: (i) it has already been published; (ii) it is under review by a journal or another conference with proceedings; or (iii) if it is submitted after the submission deadline.

While a person can submit several works, only one accepted work can be presented by the same speaker at the conference. In addition, each accepted work must be associated with (at least) one conference registration completed (paid) before the early registration deadline (1 March). Accepted submissions not associated with a complete and exclusive early conference registration will be excluded from the scientific program and from the proceedings.

You can find examples of accepted "regular papers" in previous ISCO editions at https://link.springer.com/conference/isco

The LNCS volume is a pre-conference publication of the accepted "regular papers". During May 2026, the scientific conference program on this webpage will show the accepted "extended abstracts" and accepted "regular papers" as conference proceedings assigning each one to a time slot and room (session).

Special Issue

A special issue of the journal Discrete Applied Mathematics will be dedicated to ISCO 2026. Instructions for submitting manuscripts to this Special Issue will be given during the conference.

Submission

The submission of "regular papers" and "extended abstracts" is managed using the METEOR Springer submission system.

You can find the guidelines for paper submission on the METEOR system HERE.

Please note that all submitted papers should be in the LNCS Springer format. Authors should consult Springer's authors' instructions and use the proceedings templates for the preparation of their papers using LaTeX, Overleaf, or Word .