A major goal of the book is to continue a good tradition - to bring together reputable researchers from different countries in order to provide a comprehensive coverage of advanced and modern topics in scheduling not yet reflected by other books. The virtual consortium of the authors has been created by using electronic exchanges; it comprises 50 authors from 18 different countries who have submitted 23 contributions to this collective product. In this sense, the volume can be added to a bookshelf with similar collective publications in scheduling, started by Coffman (1976) and successfully continued by Chretienne et al. (1995), Gutin and Punnen (2002), and Leung (2004). This volume contains four major parts that cover the following directions: the state of the art in theory and algorithms for classical and non-standard scheduling problems; new exact optimization algorithms, approximation algorithms with performance guarantees, heuristics and metaheuristics; novel models and approaches to scheduling; and, last but least, several real-life applications and case studies.