Overview of the workshop

The yearly Cargese-Porquerolles workshop aims to bring together researchers in combinatorial optimization around a chosen topic of current interest. It is intended to be a forum for the exchange of recent developments and powerful tools, with an emphasis on theory. Other goals include: the promotion of interactions between participants and discussion of open problems. This year the workshop will have about 60 participants, including PhD students and postdocs. There will be morning and afternoon sessions. Morning sessions will be dedicated to longer survey-type talks or open problems. The afternoon sessions will be dedicated to discussions as well as shorter talks on related topics. In their spare time, we encourage researchers to enjoy the beautiful landscape and opportunities of the island, besides solving a few open problems.


The 2017 edition

The Eighth Cargese-Porquerolles Workshop on Combinatorial Optimization, to be held in Porquerolles (FRA) from August 28th to September 1st, 2017, will be focused on Computational Combinatorial Optimization.

Previous editions

Distinguished speakers

  • Daniel Bienstock , Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Columbia University, NY.
  • Bill Cook, Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo.
  • Matteo Fischetti , Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of Padova.

Steering committee

  • Fritz Eisenbrand, Discrete Optimization Group, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Michel Goemans, Department of Mathematics, MIT, USA
  • Monique Laurent, Networks and Optimization group, CWI, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • R. Ravi, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Organizing committee


Mathematicians are known to be the only ones that can lay down in a sofa, close their eyes and pretend to work.

We propose to swap the sofa for a hammock... do you want to join ?