Two issues of the Journal of Scheduling contain 15 selected papers from the 2011 Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications (MISTA) that was held in Phoenix, Arizona (9–12 August 2011).

The 2011 conference was the fifth in the series. Previous conferences have been held in Nottingham (2003), New York (2005), Paris (2007) and Dublin (2009). The sixth conference has already taken place in Ghent, Belgium (27–30 Aug 2013), with the seventh being planned for Prague, Czech Republic in 2015.

The MISTA conference series aims to bring together scheduling researchers and practitioners from the many disciplines that engage in scheduling. The conferences attract submissions from areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Engineering, Manufacturing, Mathematics and Operations Research. The scope of the conferences covers a wide range of techniques and applications including (but by no means limited to) Delivery Scheduling, Heuristic Search, Evolutionary Algorithms, Local Search, Machine Scheduling, Job Shop Scheduling, Rostering, Timetabling and Sports Scheduling. The MISTA website (http://www.mistaconference.org) contains much more information.

MISTA 2011 was attended by about 110 people, who gave over 70 oral presentations. These consisted of both full papers and abstracts. Both abstracts and papers appeared in the conference proceedings and they are all available from the conference web site (http://www.mistaconference.org).

Following the conference, authors were invited to submit revised versions of their papers to a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling (which is spread over two volumes). The 15 accepted papers are those that received supportive reviews after undergoing a review process in keeping with the expectations of an internationally recognised journal.

We would like to thank all those who carried out reviews for both the MISTA conference and for the special issue. We recognise the time and effort involved in providing high quality reviews, and we are extremely grateful for all their help. Without this support from the international scientific community, neither the conference, nor the special issue would have been possible.

We would also like to thank the local organisation team (Phoenix), with a special thank you to Debbie Pitchfork (Nottingham), for their help in organising the conference. Without their help, the job of organising the conference would be much more difficult.