MARIA LEONILDE R. VARELA received her PhD degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from the University of Minho, Portugal in 2007. She is Assistant Professor at Department of Production and Systems of University of Minho. Her main research interests are in Manufacturing Management, Production Planning and Control, Optimization, Artificial Intelligence, 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 and Distributed Enterprises. She has published more than 150 refereed scientific papers in international conferences and in international scientific books and journals, indexed in the Web of Science and/or in the Scopus data bases. She coordinates R&D projects in the area of Production and Systems Engineering, namely concerning the development of web-based platforms and decision support models, methods and systems. She is a frequent paper reviewer for several journals, such as: Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Journal of Decision Systems, Sustainability, among others. Moreover, she collaborates with more than twenty institutions worldwide, and is a member of several international networks, such as: Machine Intelligence Research Labs, Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence (MirLabs), Euro Working Group of Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Martins, L., Fernandes, N., Varela, M. L. R., Dias, L., Pereira, G., Carmo-Silva, S. (2020), Comparative Study of Autonomous Production Control Methods using Simulation, Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, Elsevier (2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simpat.2020.102142.

Varela, M.L.R., Putnik, G. D., Manupati, V.K., Rajyalakshmi, G., Trojanowska, J., Machado, J. (2019). Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling in Networked Manufacturing Systems for I4.0: A review and framework proposal. Wireless Networks. DOI: 10.1007/s11276-019-02082-8.

Varela, L., Araújo, A., Ávila, P., Castro, H., & Putnik, G. (2019). Evaluation of the Relation between Lean Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and Sustainability. Sustainability, 11(5), 1439.

Arrais-Castro, A., Varela, M. L. R., Putnik, G. D., Ribeiro, R. A., Machado, J., & Ferreira, L. (2018). Collaborative framework for virtual organisation synthesis based on a dynamic multi-criteria decision model. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 1-12.

Reddy, M. S., Ratnam, C., Agrawal, R., Varela, M. L. R., Sharma, I., & Manupati, V. K. (2017). Investigation of reconfiguration effect on makespan with social network method for flexible job shop scheduling problem. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 110, 231-241.

Santos, A. S., Madureira, A. M., Varela, M. L. R. (2015). An ordered heuristic for the allocation of resources in unrelated parallel-machines. International Journal of Industrial Engineering Computations, Vol. 6, Issue: 2, pp. 145-156. Growing Science. DOI: 10.5267/j.ijiec.2015.1.001. DOI: 10.5267/j.ijiec.2015.1.001.

Member of the Machine Intelligence Research Labs, Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence (MirLabs), and publication chair in some of the MirLabs’ Internacional Scientifc Conferences, such as: the 19^th Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS 2019), the 15th International Conference on Information Assurance and Security (IAS 2019), and the 8th World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies (WICT 2019), the 10^th  International Conference on Innovations in Bio-Inspired Computing and Applications (IBICA 2019).

Organizer of special sessions in the scope of several MirLab’s International Scientific Conferences, for instance for the 19^th Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS 2019), and the 19^th International Conference on Innovations in Bio-Inspired Computing and Applications (ISDA 2019).

Member of the steering committee of the master's course in systems engineering at the School of Engineering from the University of Minho, Portugal.

Collaborator in several funded international scientific research projects the Social Network based doctoral Education on Industry 4.0 project. 2017-1-SE01-KA203-034524 TIPHYS. ERASMUS+, from 2017 to 2020.

Supervision of several master's dissertations and doctoral PhD thesis.