Hybrids of meta‐heuristics have been shown to be more effective and adaptable than their parents in solving combinatorial optimization problems. However, hybridized schemes are also more tedious to implement due to their increased complexity. We address this problem by proposing the meta‐heuristics development framework (MDF). In addition to being a framework that promotes software reuse to reduce developmental effort, the key strength of MDF lies in its ability to model meta‐heuristics using a “request, sense and response” schema, which decomposes algorithms into a set of well‐defined modules that can be flexibly assembled through a centralized controller. Under this scheme, hybrid schemes become an event‐based search that can adaptively trigger a desired parent's behavior in response to search events. MDF can hence be used to design and implement a wide spectrum of hybrids with varying degrees of collaboration, thereby offering algorithm designers quick turnaround in designing and testing their meta‐heuristics. Such technicality is illustrated in the paper through the construction of hybrid schemes using ant colony optimization and tabu search.

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Seven years have passed since me and my brother Felix Halim released the 3rd edition of our Competitive Programming book (CP3) on 24 May 2013 that had influenced the competitive programming field in the past decade: 2010s. We have just released the 4th edition of our book (CP4) on 19 July 2020 – the original IOI 2020 arrival day where free preview copies should have been given to all invited delegations. In this short report, we address two groups of readers: those who have read/heard about CP3 and those who are new with this book.