Optimization Management and Scheduling Problems

Dear Colleagues,

Scheduling is the process of assigning a set of resources to certain tasks over time in order to meet one or several objectives subject to a set of constraints. These scheduling processes appear in many real-world situations including the service and manufacturing industry, transportation, computer science, engineering, etc., which has resulted in numerous studies and solution procedures.

Traditional optimization techniques based on mathematical and dynamic programming have been unable to find a quality solution for many real-world scheduling problems subject to many sources of uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearity, high dimensionality structures, multimodality, etc. The ever-increasing complexity of many scheduling problems, a growing demand for accuracy and searching for optimal and robust designs, has introduced additional difficulties that could only be tackled by developing new optimization management techniques.

Over the last decades, several optimization techniques have received the attention of researchers in academic and industrial applications. Population-based algorithms, Heuristic and Metaheuristic techniques, etc., have been successfully applied to different complex optimization techniques.

This Special Issue is devoted to Optimization Management in Scheduling Problems. All contributions related to these topics are welcome, either from a theoretical perspective or through application case studies. For example, those related to projects and machine scheduling in the automotive and aviation industry, transportation industries like railway, retail and manufacturing industries, construction and engineering management, etc.

Dr. José Ramón San Cristóbal
Guest Editor

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• scheduling problems
• project scheduling
• machine scheduling
• optimization management
• heuristic approaches
• metaheuristic approaches
• population-based methods
• tabu search
• greedy search
• evolutionary algorithms
• simulated annealing
• ant colony optimization