Editorial New branches, old roots This special issue of the Journal of Scheduling is dedicated to the memory of Vyacheslav S. Tanaev (1940-2002), the initiator and the leader of scheduling research in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. His main fields of interest and contribution include the minimization of functions on permutations of partially ordered elements, conditions for the existence of non-preemptive optimal schedules, mixed graph and multigraph scheduling models, models with recursive functions, symmetric function minimization, scheduling with transfer operators, the parametric decomposition of optimization problems and many more. The main topic of this special issue is the development of ideas, mathematical analyses and solution approaches, which were developed in the early days of scheduling research and which are still theoretically and practically relevant today. There were 18 submissions to this special issue and 10 of them were accepted for publi- cation. Gordon, Kovalyov, Levin, Shafransky, Sotskov, Strusevich and Tuzikov discuss the most important results obtained by Tanaev and trace how his research has influenced other. The bibliography contains the original sources of many results which are insufficiently presented in the Western literature. Levner and Kats focus on the key contributions by Tanaev to machine scheduling with transportation considerations. In particular, they address cyclic models that arise in robotics. The authors stress Tanaev’s pioneering role in this area and give a historical account that features the techniques that he introduced in the 1960s. They discuss how these techniques have contributed towards modern research and they list a number of open questions that were posed in Tanaev’s early work. Aubry, Espinose, Jacomino and Rossi present a method for determining a configuration of a shop with multi-purpose parallel machines that allows a robust performance under demand uncertainties. Bodlaender, Schuurman and Woeginger investigate a class of scheduling problems that arise in the optimization of SQL queries for parallel machines. The aim is to distribute jobs over parallel identical machines to minimize the makespan under the following conditions. The jobs are interconnected and should communicate during their processing which takes 1