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This book discusses the main techniques and newest trends to manage and optimize the production and service systems. The book begins by examining the three main levels of decision systems in production: the long term (strategic), the middle term (tactical) and short term (operational). It also considers online management as a new level (a sub level of the short term). As each level encounters specific problems, appropriate approaches to deal with these are introduced and explained. These problems include the line design, the line balancing optimization, the physical layout of the production or service system, the forecasting optimization, the inventory management, the scheduling etc.

Metaheuristics for Production Systems then explores logistic optimization from two different perspectives: internal (production management), addressing issues of scheduling, layout and line designs, and external (supply chain management) focusing on transportation optimization, supply chain evaluation, and location of production. The book also looks at NP-hard problems that are common in production management. These complex configurations may mean that optimal solutions may not be reached due to variables, but the authors help provide a good solution for such problems. The effective new results and solutions offered in this book should appeal to researchers, managers, and engineers in the production and service industries.

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A Literature Survey on Metaheuristics in Production Systems.- Solving Unidirectional Flow Path Design Problems Using Metaheuristics.- Iterated Great Deluge for the Dynamic Facility Layout Problem.- Optimization Approaches for Multi-Level Assembly Systems Under Stochastic Lead Times.- An Adapted NSGA-H Algorithm for a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) Design Under Machines Reliability Constraints.- Levy Strategy Based Metaheuristic for Smart Grid.- Minimising Safety Stock and Lead Time in Production Systems Under Guaranteed-Service Time Models by Swarm Intelligence.- Tabu Search Approaches for Two Car Sequencing Problems with Smoothing Constraints.- Investigations on Performance Evaluation of Scheduling Heuristics and Metaheuristics in a Parallel machine Environment.- Scheduling Complex Manufacturing Systems Using a Genetic Algorithm.- An Efficient Heuristic to Minimize the Total Tardiness in the Parallel Machines Scheduling Problem.- Integrated Planning and Scheduling with Dynamic Analysis and Control of Service Level and Costs.- Meta-heuristics Approaches for the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem.- Fuzzy Modeling of Single Machine Scheduling Problems Including the Learning Effect.

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Prof. El-Ghazali Talbi received the Master and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science, both from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in France. Then he became an Associate Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Lille (France). Since 2001, he is a full Professor at the University of Lille and the head of the optimization group of the Computer Science laboratory (CRISTAL). His current research interests are in the field of multi-objective optimization, parallel algorithms, metaheuristics, combinatorial optimization, cluster and grid computing, hybrid and cooperative optimization, and application to logistics/transportation, bioinformatics and networking.

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