International Journal of Production Research Special Issue - Call for Papers Lot Sizing and Scheduling: New models and solution approaches to address industrial extensions An agile and rapid response to changing markets or demand requires planning and scheduling models that are able to represent and exploit the flexibility and characteristics of many production processes. Effective planning lies at the very heart of the operational performance of manufacturing organizations. Motivated by industrial practice, the research community has been trying to model and solve more realistic production planning problems. Among the most important and challenging problems are the sizing and scheduling of production lots. In many industrial applications, especially from the process industries, the close relationship between lot sizing and scheduling makes it imperative that both decisions are made simultaneously in order to efficiently use capacity. Traditional models have been increasingly refined to incorporate more detail and integrate lot sizing with scheduling. Increasing realism turns the mathematical models larger and more complex. This added complexity, and the need to increase the size of instances solvable to near-optimality, requires the integration of existing methods with novel and efficient optimization algorithms, along with the development of tighter models and stronger valid inequalities based on the model polyhedral structures. Moreover, there is a continuing need to trade off the complexity of reality on planning models with mathematical and computational tractability. This special issue on Lot Sizing and Scheduling aims to publish research that addresses more realistic and practical variants of models, and the use of novel solution techniques. (Pure scheduling papers do not fit the scope of this call.) In particular we seek original contributions on the following topics among others: i) Successful applications of lot sizing and scheduling models in real world cases. ii) Extensions of well known lot sizing and scheduling models, including (but not limited to): non-triangular setups, period-overlapping setups, multiple resource types, blocking, multi-level and multi-machine systems. iii) Promising novel solution techniques, exact methods, and hybrid approaches. iv) Comparison of different solution techniques. v) The effect of dealing with real life instances to carry out computational experiments, instead of relying on random instance generators. vi) Replanning and rescheduling, especially in the context of stochastic production environments Please submit your paper by email to all three the Guest Editors as a PDF or MS Word file, following the instructions for authors on the IJPR website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0020-7543&linktype=44 Please do not use IJPR's online submission system. Guest Editors of Special Issue Alistair Clark, Bristol Institute of Technology, University of the West of England, United Kingdom, [log in to unmask] Bernardo Almada-Lobo, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal, [log in to unmask] Christian Almeder, Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics, University of Vienna, Austria, [log in to unmask] Important Dates 1. Deadline for manuscripts submissions: 31 July 2009 2. Target for the completion of the first round of reviews: 31 October 2009 3. Deadline for the submissions of revised manuscripts: 31 January 2010 4. Target for the completion of the second (last) round of reviews: 1 April 2010 5. Target for sending the accepted manuscripts to the publisher: 1 May 2010.