The International Society of Management Engineers (ISME), founded in April 2003 to support ME innovation and research, covers methods and techniques related to industrial production and management, in contrast to conventional industrial engineering. Recent examples include innovative research on such topics as

· logistics,

· service,

· supply chain management,

· knowledge management.

These topics, among others, are part of ME. Other important ME areas are mobile business and e-commerce.

The ISME organized its first symposium in 2004, with such symposiums becoming a regular event. This special issue focuses on papers from the seventh International Symposium on Management Engineering ISMEf2010, held on August 26-28, 2010, in Kitakyushu, Japan. It also includes several related papers. ISME'2010 centered on “Management Engineering — Bridging the Gap between Humans and Systems.”

The symposiumfs topics include organization, corporate strategy, project management, technology management, intelligence, computation, operations research, probability and possibility theories, fuzzy sets, rough sets, approximate reasoning, linguistic information processing and automata, knowledge discovery, clustering and data analysis, fuzzy control and modeling, optimization under uncertainty and its applications, games and decision making, fuzzy analysis, and fuzzy games. These topics are reflected in this issue's contributions.

We thank:

· the authors for their outstanding work,

· ISMEf2010 participants for their helpful suggestions,

· the reviewers for their thorough analysis and constructive help,

· Professor Junzo Watada for his kind suggestions in hosting this issue, and

· the journal staff for their tireless work.