Which are the most critical nodes in a network? A Basic Variable Neighborhood Search approach -- Variable Neighborhood Descent Branching applied to the Green Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window and Mixed Fleet -- A Variable Neighborhood Heuristic for Facility Locations in Fog Computing -- A GRASP/VND Heuristic for the Generalized Steiner Problem with Node-Connectivity Constraints and Hostile Reliability -- Max-Diversity Orthogonal Regrouping of MBA Students using a GRASP/VND Heuristic -- Scheduling in parallel machines with two servers: the restrictive case -- Reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search for the generation of controlled circular data -- Sequential and Parallel Scattered Variable Neighborhood Search for Solving Nurikabe -- A Hybrid VNS for the Multi-Product Maritime Inventory Routing Problem -- Simplicial vertex heuristic in solving the Railway arrival and departure paths assignment problem -- Scheduling of Patients in Emergency Departments with a Variable Neighborhood Search -- A GRASP/VND Heuristic for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows -- Using K-means and Variable Neighborhood Search for Automatic Summarization of Scientific Articles -- BVNS approach for the Order Processing in Parallel Picking Workstations .

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Variable Neighborhood Search, ICVNS 2021, held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in March 2021. The 14 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers describe recent advances in methods and applications of variable neighborhood search. Chapter "Reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search for the Generation of Controlled Circular Data" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.