HeuristicLab[1][2] is a software environment for heuristic and evolutionary algorithms, developed by members of the Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithm Laboratory (HEAL) at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, in Hagenberg im Mühlkreis.

Developers can still extend the functionality on code level and can use HeuristicLab's plug-in mechanism that allows them to integrate custom algorithms, solution representations or optimization problems.

The main motivation for the development of HeuristicLab was to build a paradigm-independent, flexible, extensible, and comfortable environment for heuristic optimization on top of a state-of-the-art programming environment and by using modern programming concepts.

As the Microsoft .NET framework seemed to fulfill this requirements it was chosen as the development environment and C# as programming language.

In the next 2 years HeuristicLab was gradually improved which led to the release of version 3.3 in summer 2010 as open source software.