Editorial: Changes at J-DEDS

The area of discrete event systems (DES) was established in early 1980s; after more than three decades, it has developed into a mature area.This is evidenced by the healthy number of submissions and citations to our Journal.In the past few years, the number of yearly submissions has averaged about 65 and the number of yearly citations has been in the range of 260-292.Because of its special features, the DES area, as well as this Journal, is facing a number of challenges and opportunities.First, the area of DES deals with theories and applications of systems that are emerging in the new era of information technology; therefore, there is always a need to expand our arena and to accommodate newly emerging subjects.Second, as the founding Editor-in-Chief Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho put it in the inaugural editorial, the key to the answer to the question "Is the baby (journal) …going to be stunted in its development?"is: "Not if we maintain a problem-driven approach."The developments in the past 24 years provide the best answer to this question.However, the challenge is always there.The area of DES, or that of control and optimization in general, is facing the challenge that it does not "own" a problem domain; problem domains such as manufacturing, communication, networks, logistics, sensor networks, management, discrete event simulation, etc., have their own communities.In the past decade, we have maintained a close relationship with a number of major conferences in the DES or related areas, including WODES (International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems), ADHS (Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems), MSR (Modeling of Reactive Systems), and other related conferences in computer science and operations research.This has allowed us to identify newly emerging topics at the frontier of DESrelated research and publish several special issues on topics such as hybrid systems, eventbased control and optimization, performance evaluation methodologies and tools, optimization of DES, and so forth.We also have created the new category of "short papers" for rapid publication of novel but perhaps not fully developed ideas.We are happy to see that many