This is the final call for papers for MISTA 2011. The deadline is 31st January 2011.

Please also remember the special sessions (Systems to Build Systems, Healthcare and Decision-making Under Uncertainty). Futher details are at the end of this email.

We also have an excellent set of plenary speakers (Kenneth Fordyce, Kevin Glazebrook and Darrell Whitley). Further details are below.

The conference details are as follows.

MISTA 2011: Call for Papers

(Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications)

URL: http://www.mistaconference.org/

Dates: 9^th – 12^th August 2011

Location: Arizona, USA

This is the call for papers for the Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications.

(You might also be interested in the special sessions (Transport and Logistics; Healthcare; Decision-making Under Uncertainty; System to Build Systems))

The deadline for submission of papers is 31st January 2011.

Conference Scope

This conference is the fifth in a series of conferences (the first took place in Nottingham, UK in August 2003, the 2nd in New York in July 2005, the 3rd in Paris in 2007 and the 4th in Dublin in 2009) that serves as a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors on all aspects of multi-disciplinary scheduling. The conference will cover, but not be limited to, the following disciplines:

Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science
Engineering
Management
Manufacturing
Mathematics
Operational Research

The aim is to bring together scheduling researchers and practitioners from all the disciplines that engage with scheduling research. The scope of the conference includes (but is not limited to):

Agent Based Scheduling
Algorithmics
Applications
Automated Reasoning
Batch Scheduling
Commercial Packages
Complexity of Scheduling Problems
Constraint Logic Programming
Delivery Scheduling
Evolutionary Algorithms
Heuristic Search
Knowledge-Based Systems
Large Scale Scheduling
Local Search
Machine Scheduling
Meta-heuristic Search
Multi-processor Scheduling
Process Scheduling
Production Scheduling
Real World Scheduling
Real-Time Scheduling
Rostering
Rule-Based Expert Systems
Shop-Floor Scheduling
Sports Scheduling
Theoretical Scheduling
Timetabling
Transport Scheduling
Vehicle Routing

Submission Details

Authors are invited to submit papers in one of two categories

Full Papers: These papers will be accepted as full papers at the conference and will appear in the proceedings.
Extended Abstracts: These shorter papers (about 3 pages) will give you the opportunity to present your work at the conference. The abstracts will also appear in the conference proceedings.

Plenary Talks

Kenneth Fordyce, IBM Systems and Technology Group

Title: The Ongoing Challenge: A Responsive Enterprise-Wide Demand Supply Network for Semiconductor and Package Operations - Something for Everyone

Kevin Glazebrook, Lancaster University, UK

Title: Stochastic scheduling: what everyone should know about index policies

Darrell Whitley, Colorado State University, USA

Title: Flying High, or Under the Radar? Applications of Evolutionary Algorithms in Optimization, Search and Scheduling

Venue

The conference will be located at the Tempe Mission Palms (http://www.missionpalms.com/). We have negotiated special rates at the hotel.

Conference Proceedings

We will be providing the proceedings on CD or USB. Both papers and abstracts will be included in the conference proceedings. We will also make all the papers available on the conference web site after the conference.

Post Conference Special Issue

Both categories of papers will be invited to submit suitably revised and extended versions to a post conference issue of the Journal of Scheduling.

Formatting Guidelines

We provide both Word templates and Latex styles. We will only accept PDF file that have been formatted using these formatting styles.

We do NOT want page numbers on the submissions as we will add these for the conference proceedings.

Conference Chairs

John Fowler, Arizona State University, USA
Graham Kendall, University of Nottingham, UK
Barry McCollum, Queens University Belfast, UK

Special Sessions

We are pleased to announce the following special session at MISTA 2011 and welcome contributions in the form of a full paper, or an abstract:

Systems to Build Systems

Sophisticated bespoke systems which are designed by human experts frequently provide successful results in solving specific computationally difficult problems. The expert involvement might still be (in general is) required for the application of such problem tailored systems to unseen problem instances or new/other problem domains. This situation arises due to the substantial range of system design choices such as the values for the system parameters. It is an extremely challenging task for researchers, as well as practitioners, to develop effective decision support systems or search methodologies which are capable of automatically building (selecting/generating/tuning) systems. This special session focuses on hyper-heuristics in scheduling. Topics include but are not limited to:

heuristic generation methodologies (e.g. genetic programming, grammatical evolution, and others) for scheduling
adaptive/(heuristic/parameter) selection/self-tuning methodologies (e.g. evolutionary algorithms, multi-meme algorithms, adaptive operator selection, dynamic algorithm portfolios, reactive search, experimental design methods and others) for scheduling
comparison of hyper-heuristics for scheduling
multi-objective hyper-heuristics for scheduling
theoretical or empirical analysis of hyper-heuristics in scheduling
hyper-heuristic design issues in scheduling

This special session is chaired by Ender Ozcan ([log in to unmask]) and Edmund Burke and is being held in conjunction with the LANCS Initiative (see http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/).

Please visit http://www.mistaconference.org/2011/sessions/index.html for more details of this special session, the other special sessions being planned and how to submit a paper (or abstract) to this session.

Healthcare

Healthcare is a huge industry and a significant consumer of resources. There is an increasing interest in employing Operational Research methods to decrease waste and to improve efficiency. There are a variety of scheduling and related problems arising in the area of Healthcare including:

*   Employee rostering - including nurse rostering, doctor scheduling etc.
*   Scheduling of appointments
* Scheduling of operations, treatments etc.
*   Rerostering as a result of sick leave, last minute changes etc.
* Medical student scheduling
* Workforce planning and scheduling based on forecasted demand
* Exact, heuristic and hybrid methods for scheduling problems in the healthcare field

We would welcome papers on these topics or on any other applications of scheduling in the area of healthcare.

This special session is chaired by Jonathan Thompson (email: thompsonjm1@cardiff.ac.uk>) and is being held in conjunction with the LANCS Initiative (see http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/).

Please visit http://www.mistaconference.org/2011/sessions/index.html for more details of this special session, the other special sessions being planned and how to submit a paper (or abstract) to this session.

The main conference web site contains details of the general Call for Papers, and we provide some important details below:

Decision-making Under Uncertainty

When a decision-maker faces uncertainty, and that is most of the time, several questions may arise:

How to describe the uncertainty?
What are the dynamics of the problem (when do you know what)?
What does the new model look like?
Will the solution to the corresponding deterministic problem behave well in light of the uncertainty?
How do you solve (approximately) the model involving uncertainty?

In this session we will focus on what uncertainty does to a problem, its formulation, the structure of its solution, and the tools needed to solve it. Modelling-oriented papers are particularly welcome.

This special session is chaired by Stein W. Wallace (email: stein.w.wallace@lancaster) and is being held in conjunction with the LANCS Initiative (see http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/).