Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the U.S. National Science Foundation ADVANCE program for their support of this work through grant SBE-0123493. To all of the students (Luke Miller, Tung Le, Elizabeth Weber, Ozge Sumer and Orhan Dengiz) who worked on this project - your help was invaluable! I would like to pay tribute to Dr. Ted Eschenbach of the University of Alaska who started me on my journal paper writing career back in 1990 with advice and guidance I still use today. I would also like to thank Dr. Bruce Golden of the University of Maryland who invited me to join INFORMS Journal on Computing (then ORSA Journal on Computing) as an Associate Editor in 1995, a post I still hold today, and my first editorial appointment. Besides Bruce, I have been fortunate to work under some exceptional editors including Michel Gendreau (INFORMS Journal on Computing), Gilbert Laporte (Computers & Operations Research), and David Fogel and Xin Yao (both, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation). Finally, I would like to thank those coauthors with whom I have found particularly fruitful collaborations - David Tate (Institute for Defense Analyses), David Coit (Rutgers University), Bryan Norman (University of Pittsburgh) and Berna Dengiz (Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey).

Alice E. Smith
October 31, 2007
Auburn, Alabama