The legacy of MISTA conferences

The MISTA bibliographic database

This website gathers all papers and abstracts previously presented to one of the MISTA conferences. You may also find sometimes some goodies (programmes, photos, ...). You can access this bibliographic database by browsing through the previous conferences or by directly clicking on this link.

Few words on its history

The first MISTA (Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications) conference took place in Nottingham, UK in 2003. The location was chosen as the research group that started this conference was based at the University of Nottingham.

The ASAP (Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning) Group was a research group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham (the group has since changed its name and is now called “Computational Optimisation and Learning” (COL)).

The group was founded, and led, by Professor Edmund Burke. He was not only the head of ASAP but also my PhD supervisor. We jointly chaired the inaugural MISTA conference and then he had the confidence to allow me to take the lead of future MISTA conferences. I will be forever grateful to Edmund for the trust he showed in me.

That first conference was special for a number of reasons. Of course, it was the first MISTA conference, and we thought it would be successful, but could not be sure. Of equal importance to us, was a book project that we had in mind. We invited many of the leading names in meta-heuristic methodologies to not only join the conference but to participate in an additional event where we would invite them to write a chapter of a book we were considering.

The first edition of “Search Methodologies: Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques”) of the book was published in 2005, with a second edition being published in 2014. I believe that the book was successful due to the vision of Edmund that such a book was needed, but also to the quality of the authors that we were able to persuade/attract. The second edition contains 22 chapters and it reads like a who’s who of meta-heuristics research. Please take a look at the table of contents to see the chapters and the authors.

The success of the first MISTA conference, along with the book enabled us to run the MISTA conference series every two years. The decision to run it every two years was a conscious one, as the ASAP Group already ran the PATAT (Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling) conference, every two years, and we decided that the two conferences should complement each other, rather than compete.

In total, the MISTA conference series comprised nine conferences, which took place all over the world. These are the conference years, location and chairs.

  1. 2003 (13-16 August), Nottingham, UK (Chairs: Edmund Burke, Graham Kendall and Sanja Petrovic)
  2. 2005 (18-21 July), New York, USA (Chairs: Graham Kendall, Lei Lei, Mike Pinedo)
  3. 2007 (28-31 August), Paris, France (Chairs: Phillippe Bapiste, Graham Kendall, Alix Munier Kordon, Francis Sourd)
  4. 2009 (10-23 August), Dublin, Ireland (Chairs: Jacek Blazewicz, Maciej Drodowski, Graham Kendall, Barry McCollum)
  5. 2011 (9-12 August), Phoenix, Arizona, USA (Chairs: John Fowler, Graham Kendall, Barry McCollum)
  6. 2013 (27-30 August), Ghent, Belgium (Chairs: Graham Kendall, Barry McCollum, Greet Vanden Berghe)
  7. 2015 (25-28 August), Prague, Czech Replublic (Chairs: Zdenek Hanzalek, Graham Kendall, Barry McCollum, Premsyl Sucha, Greet Venden Berghe)
  8. 2017 (5-8 December), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Chairs: Aldy Gunawan, Graham Kendall, Lai Soon Lee, Barry McCollum, Hsin-Vonn Seow)
  9. 2019 (12-15 December), Ningbo, China (Chairs: Ruibin Bai, Zhi-Long Chen, Li Jaiwei, Graham Kendall, Barry McCollum)

These nine conferences produced almost 800 peer reviewed paper and abstracts, which are available in the conference proceedings. In addition, there have been several books/special issues arising from the conference.

  1. From the 2003 conference a Springer post conference book was published. This comprised 19 papers. You can see the book here.
  2. From the 2005 conference a special issue of the Annals of Operations Research was published. This comprised 26 papers. You can access the preface here and access the 26 papers here (Volume 159, Issue 1).
  3. From the 2007 conference a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling was published. This comprised five papers. You can access the preface here and access the five papers here (Volume 12, Issue 6).
  4. From the 2009 conference a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling was published. This special issue comprised 19 selected papers, split over two volumes. You can access the preface here and access the 19 papers here (Volume 14, Issue 5) and here (Volume 14, Issue 6).
  5. From the 2011 conference a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling was published. This special issue comprised 12 selected papers, split over two volumes. You can access the preface here and access the 12 papers here (Volume 17, Issue 5) and here (Volume 17, Issue 6).
  6. From the 2013 conference a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling was published. This special issue comprised 19 selected papers, split over two volumes. You can access the preface here and access the 19 papers here (Volume 19, Issue 3) and here (Volume 19, Issue 4).
  7. From the 2015 conference a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling was published. This special issue comprised 8 selected papers. You can access the preface here and access the 8 papers here (Volume 21, Issue 2).
  8. From the 2017 conference a special issue of the Journal of the Operational Research Society was published. This special issue comprised 10 selected papers. You can access the preface here and access the 10 papers here (Volume 78, Issue 8).
  9. From the 2019 conference a special issue of the International Journal of Production Research was published. This special issue comprised 18 selected papers. You can access the preface here and access the 18 papers here (Volume 61, Issue 1).

Following the 2019 conference, and after much discussion and consultation, the Board of Trustees (as MISTA was a charity) decided to close down the charity and stop running the MISTA conference. This decision was motivated by the changing roles of the many people involved and the feeling that they could not carry on running MISTA to the quality that the scholarly community deserved.

One result of closing the charity down was the donation of its surplus funds to another charity (The Operational Research Society). It was pleasing to see that some of the donated funds was able to support one of the plenary speakers the OR66 annual conference (10-12 Sep 1024) at Bangor University . The conference brochure said “For OR66, part of the MISTA funds has been utilised to support one of this year’s plenary speakers, Michel Gendreau.” We are delighted that the funds that MISTA donated were utlilised in this way.

Establishing MISTA, running the conference, managing the special issues; indeed all aspects of running an international conference, was a lot of work but, ultimately, very enjoyable and, we hope worthwhile to the community it serves.

Of course, it would not have been possible with the support of the other conference chairs, our advisors, the organising committees, the reviewers, the plenary speakers, the authors, the administrative support from a great many people and the many organisations we have dealt with (e.g. hotels, universities, conference venues etc.). As the person who was the permanent chair, I owe all of these people/organisations a huge amount, which I can never hope to repay.

When we decided to stop running MISTA after the 2019 conference, we assumed that would be it. It was fantastic to hear that others wanted to take the baton and (we hope) take MISTA to even greater heights. The Board of trustees were consulted and was unanimously supportive of MISTA starting up again under “new management”. We are confident that they will be successful and would encourage everybody to engage with future MISTA conferences.

Professor Graham Kendall (7 June 2025)