Gerd Finke received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Kiel, West Germany, in 1969. He then joined the Faculty of Engineering of the Technical University of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada, where he served as Professor in the Departments of Applied Mathematics and Industrial Engineering until 1988. He is currently Professor of operations research at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. His main interests are in combinatorial optimization, network algorithms, and scheduling and O.R. methods applied to manufacturing systems.