Calls for papers

 

European Journal of Industrial Engineering

 

Special Issue on: "Emergent Computing for Service Management"

Guest Editors:
Türkay Dereli, University of Gaziantep, Turkey
M. Emin Aydın, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Scope

The global economy is becoming increasingly service-oriented due to the key role of services, where the service industry produces over 80% of GNP and total employment in developed countries, with emerging and inspiring figures in developing countries, too. As a result, service management has received growing interest in recent years.

The importance of studying service systems and finding “robust solutions” for the problems encountered in service management (design, strategy, quality, deployment and configuration of services, service operations management, service pricing, service reliability, etc.) has been also increasing. The main aim is to find “robust and acceptable solutions” for the problems within an affordable time period. However, many problems of service industry remain with difficulties to be solved within a reasonable time due to the complexity and dynamic nature of the service systems.

Emergent computing (EC) studies offer use of nature-inspired problem solving systems, for this purpose. Examples typically cited as EC applications include (but are not limited to) agent-based systems, swarm intelligence (ant-colony, bee-colony, particle swarm algorithms etc.), cellular automata, chaos theory, evolutionary algorithms, artificial immune systems, neural and fuzzy systems etc. We believe that the use of EC for solving service management problems can improve not only “service intelligence” but also quality and performance of the service systems.

The main goal of this special issue is to increase the awareness of the service sector on the effectiveness and power of emergent computing technology, through high quality research papers. We are inviting people from both academia and industry to submit papers on their recent research experience considering emergent computing to be applied to service management problems.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
Service Management

• Service design and development processes
• Supply chain management and logistics
• Service project management
• Service quality management
• Service operations design, development and management
• Service delivery, deployment and maintenance
• Human resource management in services

Emergent Computing

• Evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristcs
• Neural and fuzzy systems
• Swarm intelligence (ant-colonies, bee-colonies and particle swarm
• optimisation etc.)
• Agent-based systems
• Cellular automata
• Chaos theory
• Artificial immune systems

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 30 January, 2008

Notification of the Initial Decision: 30 April, 2008

Notification of Acceptance: 30 July, 2008