Friday, March 18, 2011

[DMANET] Final Call for Papers - Journal of Scheduling Special Issue on Maintenance Scheduling: Theory and Applications

[Please circulate to all those who might be interested, and accept our
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CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of Scheduling

Special Issue on
Maintenance Scheduling: Theory and Applications

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~exo/specialissue/CFP_JoS2011.html

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Guest editors :
H. Murat Afsar, murat.afsar@utt.fr
Christian Artigues, artigues@laas.fr
Eric Bourreau, Eric.Bourreau@lirmm.fr
Ender Ozcan, exo@cs.nott.ac.uk

DESCRIPTION
Maintenance scheduling has been a challenging issue faced by many companies.
Allocation, coordination and timetabling of relevant resources are key steps
that must be taken so as to perform the work within prescribed time windows
whilst respecting priorities and budgets. It is also crucial that
maintenance scheduling is well integrated into the overall resource planning
process. For example, the electricity companies deal with many complex
demand and maintenance scheduling issues in their power generation
facilities (such as thermal or nuclear power plants). As a typical instance,
certain types of nuclear power plants must be regularly shutdown for
refueling and maintenance. In such cases, maintenance scheduling is a more
critical issue than demand satisfaction, especially when there is
uncertainty in demand. The decisions on the energy production rate, refuels
and outage scheduling are subject to various types of constraints. A -good-
solution satisfies imposed non-linear production profiles, complex fuel
variation equations, bounds on refueling, bounds on stocks, minimum/maximum
spacing between maintenance outages, and maintenance resource constraints
(material, teams). An additional characteristic of energy production and
maintenance scheduling, which makes the problem even more difficult, is that
the planning horizon can be long, for example several years, yielding a
large-scale optimization problem.

SCOPE
The primary focus will be on the theoretical and practical issues
surrounding the real world maintenance scheduling problems and the
methodologies used for solving them, including (but not limited to):

- Lower bounds
- Methods and structures to handle large scale problems, such as
decomposition techniques (e.g., Benders' decomposition, column generation)
- Rolling horizon procedures
- Constraint-based scheduling
- Scenario-based scheduling
- Novel scheduling approaches
- Approximation algorithms
- Metaheuristics (Tabu search, simulated annealing, ant colony optimization,
variable neighbourhood search, evolutionary algorithms, local search, and
more)
- Mathematical programming (Integer programming, constraint programming,
dynamic programming, and more)
- Hybrid methods (e.g., matheuristics, memetic algorithms)
- Automated (computer aided) design of heuristics (e.g., hyper-heuristics,
adaptive operator selection)

SUBMISSIONS
Papers should be submitted electronically via the Journal of Scheduling's
online submission system at
http://www.editorialmanager.com/josh/, following the journal's instructions
to authors. Please indicate that your submission is to the Special Issue on
"Maintenance Scheduling: Theory and Applications" (by selecting "Maintenance
Scheduling" as the article type). Your paper will be automatically assigned
a reference number i.e. JOSHxxx after approval. All papers submitted to the
special issue will go through the normal strict peer review process of the
Journal of Scheduling to ensure the high quality of this volume.

IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline 26th of March, 2011
First notification 26th of September, 2011
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