310 About the Contributors Ioannis Minis is a Professor in the Department of Financial and Management Engineering of the University of Aegean. He conducts research in design, production and operations systems, including supply chain management. Dr. Minis holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland in Me- chanical Engineering, and has held the positions of Assistant and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the same University (1988-1997). He is conducting research in Operations for over 20 years and has authored two edited volumes, several book chapters, over 45 journal articles and over 60 articles in conference proceedings. Dr. Minis has been the recipient of the 1993 Earl E. Walker Out- standing Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). Vasileios Zeimpekis is Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Financial & Management Engineer- ing at the University of the Aegean. He is also Senior Research Officer at the Design, Operations, & Production Systems (DeOPSys) Lab situated at the same University. His interests focus on road trans- portation & logistics with emphasis on decision support systems and telematics. He has published 3 edited volumes and more than 40 papers in the area of supply chain and transportation. Vasileios, holds a BEng(Hons) in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Essex, (UK). He has also been awarded with an MSc in Mobile & Satellite Communications from the University of Surrey (UK) and an MSc with Distinction in Engineering Business Management from the University of Warwick (UK). He earned his PhD from the Department of Management Science & Technology at the Athens University of Economics & Business. Georgios Dounias holds a Production and Management Engineering Diploma and a Doctoral Diploma both from the Technical University of Crete, Dept. of Production Engineering & Management. Since 2003 he is with the Department of Financial & Management Engineering, University of the Aegean, Chios, Greece (Full Professor since May 2010). He has served as Head of the Department (2008-2010), Head of the Postgraduate Studies in Financial and Management Engineering (2005-2008) and he is also Director of the Management and Decision Engineering Laboratory (2005-today). His research interests are related to Computational & Nature Inspired Intelligence, Management Engineering, Financial De- cision Making, Medical Decision Making and Fault Diagnosis of Complex Dynamic Systems. George Dounias has participated in more than 25 national and international funded research programs in the last 20 years. He has published over 150 research reports and papers in journals, books and conferences, within 1993-2010 and he has served as editorial board member, guest editor or reviewer of 28 refereed international journals and as organizing / program committee in more than 60 international conferences, summer schools and special research events. Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. About the Contributors Nicholas Ampazis holds a BEng (Hons) degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College London (1992), an MSc degree with Distinction in Information Processing and Neural Networks from the Department of Mathematics, King’s College London (1995), and a PhD with Distinction from the Department of Electical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (2001). From 1996 to 2001 he was a scholar with the Institute of Informatics at the National Center from Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece. From 2002 to 2005 he was an adjunct professor at the Department of Financial and Management Engineering (FME), University of the Aegean, and since 2005 he is an as- sistant professor (computer science) at the same department. He is also the director of the Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Laboratory (IDEAL) at the FME departhment. His research interests include computational intelligence algorithms (with emphasis in neural networks), data mining, information retrieval, recommender systems and supply chain management, and has published over 40 papers journal and conference papers in these research areas. * * * Theodore Athanasopoulos is currently a PhD candidate and research associate at the Department of Financial Management & Engineering. He holds a diploma on Production Engineering & Management from the Technical University of Crete. His research focuses on transportation management, routing and scheduling problems and mathematical programming. He has published more than 10 papers in scientific journals and conferences in the area of supply chain and transportation. On the past he has worked as a business consultant in major transportation organization as well in other public and private organizations, in strategic and business planning and business process re-engineering. Pierluigi Argoneto received his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, year 2003, obtained summa “cum laude” from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Basilicata, Italy. From the DTMPIG of the University of Palermo, Italy, he holds a doctoral degree in Production Engineering, year 2007. During and after his Ph.D., thematic concerning the analysis, the design and the negotiation protocol tests for e-procurement applications have been investigated. A second research interest has been the analysis of competitive environment, with a particular focus on the decision support methodologies at strategic level, mainly based on a game theoretic approach. Another research line concerns the formal- ization and the study of networked enterprises by using Real Options and cooperative games as tools for decisional support systems. Nowadays he works at the Healthcare Department of the Regione Basilicata at the office of strategic investments and management of financial resources of the healthcare system. Vlachos Dimitrios is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). He received Diplomas in Electrical Engineering and in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, all from AUTH. He has also been a post-doctoral fellow at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. His research interests include quantitative analysis of supply chains and inventory systems, risk management, green logistics and reverse logistics. His papers have been published among other journals in Management Science, IIE Transactions, Euro- pean Journal of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Economics and Production in Operations Management. 311 About the Contributors Dimitrios M. Emiris is an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Management and Technology, University of Piraeus, Greece. He obtained the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, in 1987. He obtained the M.Sc. and the Ph.D., in 1988 and 1991, respectively, from the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Rochester. From 1997 to 2001 he served as an Assistant Professor of the Production Systems Division at the Department of Production Engineering and Management, of the Technical University of Crete. He has published over 100 articles in international journals and conferences and is the author of three books. His research interests lie in the areas of computational intelligence, logistics, project and production management. Michael C. Georgiadis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Informatics and Telecommunications, at University of Western Macedonia, Greece and honorary senior research fellow in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. He was manager of academic business development for Process Systems Enterprise Ltd, UK. He obtained his Chemical Engineering Diploma from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and an MSc and PhD from Imperial College London. Dr. Georgiadis has co-authored over 60 papers and seven books. He has a long experience in the management and participation of more than 20 collaborative research contracts and projects and consults to Process Systems Enterprise Ltd and Parametric Optimization Solutions Ltd. Soumia Ichoua is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Johnson C. Smith University , Charlotte, NC. She is also an adjunct Professor at the Department of Operations & Decision Systems in Laval University , Canada and an associate member of Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT), Canada. Her research interests lie in the application of dynamic-stochastic optimization techniques and parallel algorithms to supply chain networks, logistics, industrial scheduling and distribution systems management. Dr. Ichoua has been supervising several undergraduate and graduate students in projects related to these fields. Some of her research papers have been published in leading journals in the field of transportation and Operations Research including Transportation Science, European Journal of Op- erational Research, and Computers and Operations Research. Dimitrios E. Koulouriotis received his PhD in Intelligent Systems from Department of Production and Management Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2001. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Democritus University of Thrace and the M.S. in Elec- tronic