Leonilde Varela

Leonilde Varela is Assistant Professor at Department of Production and Systems, and an integrated member of the Algoritmi Research Centre, at University of Minho, Portugal, and she received her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management from the same University and Department in 2007. She has been working in this department since 1994, by teaching and doing research, besides collaborating in management tasks, namely regarding the coordination of the industrial management and systems subgroup that she integrates since 1994, and has coordinated from 2012 to 2021. She has also integrated the steering committee of the master's course in Systems Engineering, between 2016 and 2019, and currently, since 2021 she is the director of the Quality Engineering and Management master course. Her main research interests are in Manufacturing Management, Collaborative Management, Production Planning and Control, Optimization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Meta-heuristics, Scheduling, Web based Systems, Services and technologies, mainly for supporting Engineering and Production Management, Collaborative Networks, Decision Making Models, Methods and Systems, and Virtual, Distributed and Networked Enterprises. She has published more than 200 refereed scientific papers in international conferences and in international scientific books and journals, and conference proceeding books, indexed in the Web of Science and/or in the Scopus data bases. She coordinates several research projects, namely with financial support from the national Foundation for Science and Technology, along with PhD and MSc projects, in the area of Production and Systems Engineering, namely concerning the development of collaborative management models, methods, and tools, varying from more traditional decision support approaches to advanced intelligent systems and web-based platforms. She is a member of several international institutions and research groups, such as the Machine Intelligence Research Labs, Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence (MirLabs), where she is a publication chair, and through which she has been integrating organizing and scientific committees in several associated international conferences, besides her association, as a member in the Euro Working Group of Decision Support Systems, in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; in the Industrial Engineering Network, and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers.