Preface

The 28th International Workshop on Combinational Algorithms (IWOCA 2017) was held during July 17–21, 2017, in Newcastle, Australia. This meeting was dedicated to the memory of Emeritus Professor Mirka Miller, who sadly passed away in January 2016. Mirka was a founding member of AWOCA, as IWOCA was then known, and attended many gatherings of this workshop since its initiation in 1988. Mirka was present at AWOCA 2006 at which it was decided to change the name to IWOCA to better reflect the growing international participation and interest. Mirka was a member of the IWOCA Steering Committee from its beginning until her death.

Obituaries have appeared in the Australian Mathematical Society Gazette(see http://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Gazette/2016/July16/ObitMiller.pdf) as well as the AKCE International Journal of Graphs and Combinatorics and the Bulletin of The Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications. In 2017 a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics was dedicated to Mirka. The introduction is available at https://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/pdf/69/ajc v69 p292.pdf.

For IWOCA 2017, calls for papers were distributed widely around the world and participants came from Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, UK, as well as Australia. The invited speakers were Martin Baca (Kosice, Slovakia), Henning Fernau (Trier, Germany), Costas Iliopolous (UK), and Diane Donovan and Jennifer Seberry both of Australia. All five invited papers are included in these LNCS proceedings. There were 55 contributed submissions. Each contributed submission was reviewed by at least two, though generally three Program Committee members. The committee decided to accept 30 papers.

We thank the sponsors of IWOCA 2017: CARMA, School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, EATCS, and Springer. We acknowledge and thank all members of the Program Committee and the Organizing Committee for their commitment to IWOCA and for their excellent and timely work. Last but not least, we thank EasyChair that we used for organizing the conference, as well the informal proceedings and these LNCS proceedings, which made our job so much easier.