Research trends in combinatorial optimisation

TL;DR

This bibliometric analysis of 8,393 publications reveals global research trends in combinatorial optimisation, highlighting focus areas like metaheuristics and real-world applications in energy, production, and data management.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel keyword analysis algorithm to identify key topics, collaborations, and trends in the rapidly expanding field of combinatorial optimisation.

Findings

Metaheuristics like genetic algorithms dominate CO research.

Growing focus on real-world applications in energy, production, and data management.

Identification of leading countries, organizations, and authors in CO research.

Abstract

Real-world problems are becoming highly complex and, therefore, have to be solved with combinatorial optimisation (CO) techniques. Motivated by the strong increase of publications on CO, 8,393 articles from this research field are subjected to a bibliometric analysis. The corpus of literature is examined using mathematical methods and a novel algorithm for keyword analysis. In addition to the most relevant countries, organisations and authors as well as their collaborations, the most relevant CO problems, solution methods and application areas are presented. Publications on CO focus mainly on the development or enhancement of metaheuristics like genetic algorithms. The increasingly problem-oriented studies deal particularly with real-world applications within the energy sector, production sector or data management, which are of increasing relevance due to various global developments. The demonstration of global research trends in CO can support researchers in identifying the relevant issues regarding this expanding and transforming research area.