Ali Allahverdi, Erwin Pesch, Michael Pinedo, Frank Werner

• This special issue is dedicated to the celebration of the 55th anniversary of International Journal of Production Research and its relevancy in scheduling. The idea was to present the state-of-the-art in scheduling with respect to theoretical advances as well as practical relevancy in modern manufacturing and resource planning. Thus, the aim of this issue was to attract high-quality papers on most recent developments in modelling and solving scheduling problems in manufacturing systems which include parallel as well as multi-stage facilities, the wide area of logistics, supply chains or new applications. Potential authors were encouraged to submit their best recent research particularly in new and challenging scheduling areas leading to advanced perspectives in scheduling. As possible current research topics, we suggested for instance grouping and sequencing operations in multi-stage systems, new scheduling approaches for flexible shops, new developments for scheduling with precedence constraints, batching and further technological constraints, assembly flow shop scheduling, scheduling with setup times/cost, just-in-time scheduling, new types of scheduling heuristics and approximation algorithms, scheduling under resource constraints, connections between scheduling and logistics, scheduling problems related to energy management, game theoretic aspects in scheduling, scheduling in segments of a supply chain, scheduling under uncertainty, online scheduling, or new scheduling applications in logistics, traffic, health care, mechanical and industrial engineering, human–computer interaction.