Introduction to the special issue: evolutionary algorithms for scheduling.

Scheduling is a problem that occurs in a large variety of forms with huge cumulative economic and social consequences. Proper scheduling can provide better utilization of scarce and expensive resources as well as higher satisfaction for individuals such as customers and employees. For this reason, there has been a lot of effort expended over a large number of years on algorithms for automatic scheduling. However, except for a few isolated successes on some specialized problems, automatic scheduling remains an open problem. There are a few reasons why scheduling is such a difficult problem. One is the size and complexity of the search space. For the generic problem of assigning N tasks to M resources with a particular