Yoshiaki Shimizu is a professor in the Production Systems Engineering department at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. Professor Shimizu received his BSc, MEng and PhD in chemical engineering from Kyoto University. After graduate school, Prof. Shimizu was employed by Kyoto University where he carried out research on nuclear waste management and reactor safety. His current research interests include life cycle engineering, network design approaches for distribution systems, multi-objective optimization, meta-heuristic algorithms, and supply chain management. He is a member of the Society of Chemical Engineers of Japan, the Society of Mechanical Engineers of Japan, the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan, the Institute of Systems of Japan, the Control and Information Engineers Society of Japan and the Operation Research Society of Japan. Zhong Zhang is a professor of the Production Systems Engineering department at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. He received his Bachelor engineering and Master engineering degrees in 1982 and 1984 respectively, from Xi'an Highway University, China, and his Doctor engineering degree in 1993 from Okayama University, Japan. He is a member of the Society of Mechanical Engineers of Japan; the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan; Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan; Research Institute of Signal Processing, Japan; Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan; IEEE. Rafael Batres is an associate professor of industrial systems engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. His research interests include engineering safety, process synthesis, multi-agent systems, and ontologies. Rafael holds MS and PhD degrees in process systems engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Society of Chemical Engineers of Japan, the Artificial Intelligence Society of Japan, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Society for Engineering Education.