Call for Book Chapters - Metaheuristics for Scheduling

Both volumes are currently in press: Please see Springer web site for more details. All contact authors will receive a free copy of the volume.

Many thanks again to all contributing authors and reviewers for making this book project a great success!

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First of all many thanks for your contributions and making this edited volume a real success! We have decided to compile two separate volumes as follows:

Thanks for your contributions and cooperation. We expect the books to be published by March/April 2008. Please watch out this page for all updates.

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June 23, 2007: All the chapters are in the review process. Currently, we are receiving the review reports and we envisage a delay in the notification process. We are trying our best to notify the authors as soon as possible. If you do not hear from us by July 20, please contact the guest editors. We apologize for the delay and thanks in advance for your patience and support.

With the rapid development of Internet and other new technologies, different kinds of network, distributed computing paradigms and platforms are emerging as the new wave in computing of the new millennium. Examples of such emergent computational systems are Grid and P2P systems, which are currently being used for solving many complex problems from science and engineering. A broad range of issues are being addressed nowadays, from theory to practical development and fast advances are made and reported by researcher from both academia and industry for a wide range of problems in this context. One such important issue is the scheduling problem, that is, the efficient allocations of jobs to geographically distributed resources, which is indispensable for the development of High Performance Distributed Applications.

Despite of the family of scheduling problems being one of the must studied by the optimization research community, the available approaches do not apply in a straightforward way to the Job Scheduling in Computational Grids and P2P systems as it significantly differs from conventional scheduling on LANs or parallel computer systems. This can be explained by the fact that scheduling in grid systems adds new features not present in conventional scheduling due to proper scheduling characteristics of the large-scale distributed environments. Indeed, jobs have their own characteristics, for instance, due to the heterogeneity of resources, jobs and resources could be incompatible. Moreover, given the dynamics of such systems, schedulers should be very fast in order to adapt to the changes of the system. Regarding the optimization criteria, besides typical optimization criteria such as minimization of makespan and flowtime, other important criteria are to be considered such as maximizing resource utilization, resource owner's benefits, etc. Thus, the problem is multi-objective in its general formulation. On the other hand, scheduling must take into account possible local policies on resources (e.g. access and cost), the existence of local schedulers, etc. Therefore, current research efforts are addressing new techniques for dealing in practice with the complexity of the problem, among them, we distinguish the meta-heuristic techniques--the de facto approach for hard combinatorial optimization problems.

There exists a need for an edited collection of articles in this disciplinary area that will give a comprehensive view of most recent advances from theory and practice of the job scheduling problem in large-scale distributed systems. The book aims to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and latest empirical research findings in this regard. Readers can benefit from this book in understanding the basics and current techniques applied for solving the scheduling problem in emergent computational systems, as well as its use in developing large-scale distributed applications.

The audiences of this book are senior or graduate students major in computer science, computer engineering, applied informatics, or management information system as well as professional instructors and researchers. The book is also written for professionals in distributed computing paradigms who want to understand the essentials of using meta-heuristics for tackling the scheduling and resource allocation problems in Grid, P2P and other computational emergent systems.

The book is intended to be published in the Springer Verlag, Series - 'Studies in Computational Intelligence'. Please prepare the manuscript using the author guidelines and format given in the following link: Author Guidelines

PROPOSAL: Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before ~~January 15, 2007~~ February 20, 2007 a 2-5 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. Authors will be notified about the suitability of the chapters within 2 weeks of the submission date.
Full CHAPTER SUBMISSION: ~~March 30, 2007~~ April 30, 2007 Chapters have to be no more than 40 pages length and will be peer-reviewed by at least three referees.

The book is scheduled to be published by Springer-Verlag by end of 2007. Inquiries and Submissions can be forwarded electronically (as a
PDF file) to one of the Volume editors:

Volume Editors:

Fatos Xhafa, Ph.D.
Department of Languages and Informatics Systems
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Campus Nord, Ed. Omega, C/Jordi Girona 1-3,
08034 Barcelona,

SPAIN

Email: fatos@lsi.upc.edu
Tel: +34 93-413-7880
Fax:+34 93-413-7833

Nr.	AUTHORS	CHAPTER TITLE
1.	Zne-Jung Lee, Shih-Wei Lin, Kuo-Ching Ying	A Dynamical Ant Colony Optimization with Heuristics for Scheduling Jobs on a Single Machine with a Common Due Date
2.	Ricardo Galan	Hybrid Heuristic Approaches for Scheduling in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems
3.	Jens Czogalla and Andreas Fink	Analysis and Extension of Particle Swarm Optimization for the Continuous Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem
4.	Seamus M. McGovern, Surendra M. Gupta	Deterministic Search Algorithm for Sequencing and Scheduling Problems
5.	M. Emin Aydin, Mehmet Sevkli	Sequential and Parallel Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithms for Job Shop Scheduling Problems
6.	D. Ferreira P.M. França A. Kimms R. Morabito S. Rangel and C.F.M. Toledo	Heuristics and meta-heuristics for lot sizing and scheduling in the soft drinks industry: a comparison study
7.	Pawel B. Myszkowski	Solving Scheduling Problems by Evolutionary Algorithms for Graph Coloring Problem
8.	P. Tormos, A. Lova, F. Barber, L. Ingolotti, M. Abril, and M.A. Salido	A Genetic Algorithm for Railway Scheduling Problems
9.	Soumya Banerjee, G.S.Dangayach S.K.Mukherjee, P.K.Mohanty	Modeling Process and Supply Chain scheduling using Hybrid Meta-heuristics
10.	G.I. Zobolas, C.D. Tarantilis and G. Ioannou	Meta-heuristic Algorithms for Solving Shop Scheduling Problems
11.	Manuel Iori, Silvano Martello	Scatter Search Algorithms for Identical Parallel Machine Scheduling Problems
12.	Alvaro García-Sánchez, Luis Miguel Arreche, and Miguel Ortega-Mier	Combining Simulation and Tabu Search for oil-derivatives pipeline scheduling

Nr.	Authors	Chapter title
1.	A. Bendjoudi, S. Guerdah, M. Mansoura, N. Melab, and E-G. Talbi	P2P B&B and GA for the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem
2.	David Montana and John Zinky	Optimizing Routing and Backlogs for Job Flows in a Distributed Computing Environment
3.	Dazhang Gu and Lonnie Welch	Robust Allocation and Scheduling Heuristics for Dynamic, Distributed Real-time Systems
4.	A. LaTorre, B, V. Robles, and P. de Miguel	Supercomputer Scheduling with Innovative Evolutionary Techniques
5.	Jia Yu, Rajkumar Buyya and Kotagiri Ramamohanarao	Workflow Scheduling Algorithms for Grid Computing
6.	Li Chunlin, Li Layuan	QoS in Computational Grid: A joint optimization Approach
7.	Kamer Kaya, Cevdet Aykanat	Adapting Iterative-Improvement Heuristics for Scheduling File-SharingTasks on Heterogeneous Platforms
8.	ChongSun Hwang	Advanced Job Scheduler based on Markov Availability Model and Resource Selection in Desktop Grid Computing Environment
9.	George Iordache, Marcela Boboila, Florin Pop, Corina Stratan, and Valentin Cristea	Decentralized Grid Scheduling using Genetic Algorithms
10.	Benjamin Khoo B. T, Bharadwaj Veeravalli	An Adaptive Co-ordinate based Scheduling Mechanism for Grid Resource Management with Resource Availabilities for Grid Computing Environments