Guest editorial - Special issue "New challenges in scheduling theory" (Marseilles Workshop, May 12-16, 2008)

Traditionally, scheduling research is concerned with the sequencing of tasks on one machine or on several parallel or different machines, subject to a set of constraints. Over the years, researchers have studied a huge variety of problems, developing numerous heuristics, approximation and exact algorithms, and complexity results. Some of these problems are interesting because of their intractability. Others are interesting because of their applications in production planning, personnel planning, scheduling in parallel and distributed systems, etc. For the most recent introduction to the state of the art, see Błażewicz et al. (2007). In recent years, researchers have begun studying the scheduling problems derived from new applications and settings. For example, there are scheduling problems in decentralized systems and selfish organizations, grid computing, bioinformatics, and logistical airport operations management processes. Some of these scheduling problems re-