His main research interests are the application of metaheuristics and neural networks in planning and optimization systems. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Computation Journal (ECJ) and Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE). Since 2007, he is member of the Executive Committee of ACM SIGEVO. He serves as treasurer for ACM SIGEVO since 2011 (re-elected in 2014). He has been organizer of many workshops and tracks on heuristic optimization issues, chair of EvoWorkshops in 2005 and 2006, co-organizer of the European workshop series on "Evolutionary Computation in Communications, Networks, and Connected Systems", co-organizer of the European workshop series on "Evolutionary Computation in Transportation and Logistics", and co-chair of the program committee of the GA track at GECCO 2006. He was conference chair of GECCO 2009. In 2016 and 2016, he co-chairs the metaheuristic stream at OR2016 and OR2017 in Hamburg and Berlin, respectively.