With the high complexity and numerous constraints in process industry, process scheduling is more difficult than discrete machine scheduling, especially, large-scale process scheduling is still quite challenging to researchers and practitioners. The researchers often use mathematical models to solve small-size problems to optimality. However, for the practical large-scale problems, it is still hard to obtain acceptable solutions within reasonable time by using such exact models in current computing environments. Hence scheduling by simple heuristic rules is still prevalent in real industry. Despite the extensive use of meta- heuristics in machine scheduling, little literature exists on meta-heuristics for process scheduling. This book has studied and developed meta-heuristic methods for large-scale process scheduling. The major contribution of this book is the effective and intelligent use of heuristics to guide the solution methods to search in the feasible or promising space, thus quickly finding high-quality solutions. The target readers are the professionals and students with interest to scheduling and combinatorial optimization.

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