Advances in Production Engineering & Management (APEM journal) is an interdisciplinary international academic journal published quarterly. The main goal of the APEM journal is to present original, high quality, theoretical and application-oriented research developments in all areas of production engineering and production management to a broad audience of academics and practitioners. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, applications based on advanced theory and case studies are particularly welcome. For theoretical papers, their originality and research contributions are the main factors in the evaluation process. General approaches, formalisms, algorithms or techniques should be illustrated with significant applications that demonstrate their applicability to real-world problems. Please note the APEM journal is not intended especially for studying problems in the finance, economics, business, and bank sectors even though the methodology in the paper is quality/project management oriented. Therefore, the papers should include a substantial level of engineering issues in the field of manufacturing engineering.