Standard operational research is now a mature and widely recognized field of applied mathematics and high-level computation. The ever-growing realm of applications and the computing power explosion of the last two decades are driving related research in new exciting directions, continuing to play an important role in modern management engineering. A pioneering position of those real world OR applications holds for supply chain management, a fast growing topic combining computing algorithms either based on discrete mathematics and heuristics or, related to computational intelligence based on evolution, learning and adaptation. To this end, we hope that the present Volume contributes towards the advancement of high quality research in CI solutions for real world OR problems."
– Ioannis Minis, University of the Aegean, Greece; Vasileios Zeimpekis, University of the Aegean, Greece; Georgios Dounias, University of the Aegean, Greece; and Nicholas Ampazis, University of the Aegean, Greece