[Call for Papers]

European Journal of Operational Research
Special Issue on “Sustainable Scheduling of Manufacturing and Transportation Systems”


* Motivation

Traditional scheduling models for manufacturing and transportation focus on profit-driven performance indicators, e.g., makespan as a measure of productivity and delivery timeliness as a measure of service quality. This neglects the negative externalities generated by manufacturing and transportation operations, such as excessive carbon emissions and other undesirable by-products threatening our environment. In recent years, however, natural resource deficiency, environmental deterioration and regulatory pressure have urged relevant companies or organisations to pay more attention to the sustainability aspects of manufacturing and transportation systems.

For example, in some manufacturing firms, the performance measure of greatest concern at present is energy consumption. Usually, the peak electrical power consumption of a manufacturing plant is limited during specific hours or seasons. Scheduling could play an important role in improving the energy efficiency besides the adoption of new production equipment. In the transportation sector, alternative fuel vehicles (e.g., hybrid electric vehicles) have been introduced to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and toxic air pollutants. Scheduling the new types of vehicles considering their specific refuelling requirements can directly help to control the carbon footprint of transportation.

The recent shift from economic profit to sustainability has created a noticeable gap between the theoretical scheduling assumptions and the real-world scenarios. At the same time, however, this represents a great opportunity for researchers to propose new scheduling models and algorithms. In this special issue, we solicit original and high-quality papers presenting the latest scheduling research with sustainability considerations. This includes defining new scheduling problems based on the features of practical manufacturing/transportation systems and developing novel solution approaches based on exact and/or meta-heuristic algorithms.

* Topics

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
• Energy-aware process planning and production scheduling
• Scheduling for manufacturing processes with environmental criteria
• Energy-efficient facility layout and assembly line balancing
• Manufacturing operations scheduling under varying energy prices
• Production planning and scheduling with carbon emissions trading
• Vehicle routing and scheduling with alternative fuel vehicles
• Transportation scheduling with pollutant emission control
• Optimal location of alternative fuelling stations
• Public transport scheduling and network design with sustainability considerations
• Congestion control and management integrated with traffic scheduling
• Manufacturing and logistics scheduling for supply chain sustainability
• Reducing carbon footprints in the supply chain by integrated scheduling
• Case studies for implementation of green manufacturing, supply chains and logistics

To solve the relevant scheduling problems, different methods based on exact and/or meta-heuristic algorithms may be applied, including but not limited to:
• Exact algorithms (branch and bound, Lagrangian relaxation, dynamic programming, etc.)
• Local search techniques (simulated annealing, Tabu search, variable neighbourhood search, etc.)
• Evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, differential evolution, etc.)
• Swarm intelligence algorithms (particle swarm optimisation, ant colony optimisation, artificial bee colony, etc.)
• Methods that hybridise different meta-heuristics or combine meta-heuristics with exact solution approaches

* Submission

Prospective authors are asked to follow the EJOR guide for authors and submit their papers via the EES (http://ees.elsevier.com/ejor). Please select “SI: Sustainable Scheduling” as the “Article Type” during the submission process. Submitted papers will undergo a normal review process according to the high standard of EJOR.

* Important Dates

Paper Submission Due: December 1, 2014
Notification of Review Results: March 31, 2015
Revised Manuscript Due: May 31, 2015
Final Decision: July 31, 2015

* Guest Editors

Rui Zhang, Nanchang University, China (zhangrui@ncu.edu.cn)
Raymond Chiong, The University of Newcastle, Australia (Raymond.Chiong@newcastle.edu.au)
Zbigniew Michalewicz, The University of Adelaide, Australia (zbigniew.michalewicz@adelaide.edu.au)
Pei-Chann Chang, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan (iepchang@saturn.yzu.edu.tw)