Operations Research has always received great interests from researchers around the globe. The recent advancement of technology has helped researchers to be able to tackle real-world combinatorial and stochastic problems by designing more efficient exact, heuristics or metaheuristics algorithms which had been impossible to solve a decade ago. These researches have helped many enterprises to run their business more efficiently. We encourage researchers to contribute to this area by submitting their manuscript to be published at this special issue.

The aim of this special issue is to foster the state–of-the-art researches and collecting novel, unpublished, and high-quality papers in the area of Combinatorial Optimization and Stochastic Programming, covering both their theoretical and applied aspects. This special issue will try to provide a learning opportunity for the OR community by publishing novel interdisciplinary researches from around the world and highlighting the future research directions.

In current time, soft computing techniques have an astonishing development to tackle a variety of real-time scientific computing problems, engineering problems, and optimization problems. It is useful for big data applications, cloud computing, control system, data mining and clustering, decision making and risk management. The principal apparatuses of soft computing techniques are evolutionary techniques, fuzzy set and logic, neural network, artificial intelligence, chaotic system, probabilistic reasoning & computing, machine learning etc. The amalgamation of key factors of various basic techniques emerges the new hybrid and efficient algorithm for solving the problem. The special issue engrossed on a comprehensive range of soft computing techniques and its applications in engineering and scientific problems. It covers the investigation, simulation, and analysis of complex issues and phenomena. The issue publishes the original & unpublished research articles comprising the latest development of the soft computing techniques, real-time applications of soft computing techniques and their reviews. The issue conveys the innovative research ideas; the real-world utility of mathematics, latest achievements and has a prodigious significance in the life of academics, practitioners, researchers and industry leaders.The target audiences are undergraduate, postgraduate students of engineering and allied branches, engineers, research scientists/ academicians who involved in the development of the soft computing techniques and their applications. The aim of the special issue is to bring together researchers, engineers, and practitioners to present the latest achievements and innovations in the interdisciplinary areas of soft computing, to discuss thought-provoking developments and challenges and to consider potential future directions involved in it.

Health care expenditures play a major role of a country’s economy. In 2013, Health care expenditures mean for Group of Seven (G-7) countries was nearly %11.3 of their nations’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Health costs still continue to grow in the World. It is clear that Healthcare is one of the largest industries in the World. According to International Standart Industrial Classification (ISIC), Health care industry can be divided into following categories ; (It is possible to find other classification from different institutions)

i. Hospital activities

ii. Medical and dental practice activities

iii. Other human health activities

Operations Research (OR) can be applied all categories which are given above and it is not suprising that application of OR is still a hot topic in the domain of healthcare for researchers.

The stage of development of the logistics management thinking and of the OR methods make possible the solving of many problems of the organizations and reinforce the cohesion in the supply chain. As one result, we can observe a better integration of the levels of decision for the efficiency of the strategic logistic plan with the possibility of applying a broad point of view, meaning satisfactory financial results and high quality of the service levels while the bio-diversity is respected.

This creates a scenario allowing the formulation and solution of many actual organization problems with such methods, since the simple ones to the more complex. Reports of applications of OR in logistics and the supply chain cohesion are very important to disseminate the importance of OR to obtain the better results for today and for the future.

Many of forecasting methods are based on probability theory. Recent years, new forecasting methods have been proposed and they are not based on probability theory. Because these new methods do not required assumptions like probabilistic methods, they have been preferred by researchers. Artificial neural networks, fuzzy inference systems and fuzzy time series methods are well known intelligent forecasting methods. Moreover, many of researchers proposed hybrid methods of intelligent forecasting methods and probabilistic methods. Many of problems about intelligent forecasting methods are still wait to be solved. Aim of this special issue is to collect papers from intelligent forecasting method researchers and to create a basic resource for new researchers.

Inventory control and management are two facets of any business organisation in a given economy. In globalized marketing system, enterprises have to face many challenges that result in offering affordable care and innovative strategies through service design and delivery processes. Although most of the industrialists’ objectives are to earn more profit, capturing the market through their innovative strategies, they should pay attention on environmental pollution due to industry that is social responsibility. Researchers can contribute their perspectives on how to build a novel structure for inventory control and management to improve firm’s/enterprize’s economic performance.

Operational Research provides optimal solutions to various enterprises and thus helps in running their businesses efficiently. In fact, the Operational Research techniques are heavily used in production processes, logistics, insurance and finance, computer-communication, population studies, procurement and distribution, project management and many more. Queuing theory is a branch of Operational Research which provides optimal solutions to the systems involving the queues (waiting lines). Queuing theory has played a vital role in modeling the communication systems, traffic systems, production and storage etc. A number of advancements in queuing theory have taken place, e. g. queues with retention of impatient customers, queues with catastrophes, retrial queuing, fuzzy queuing etc.

The purpose of this special issue is to foster the state –of- the- art research in the area of queuing theory. This issue presents the advances in queuing theory and its applications in various areas like marketing management, supply chain management, finance, revenue management, computer communication, inventory management etc.