In many engineering and applied sciences fields, researchers encounter a special class of problems known as boundary value problems, or characteristic value problems. The desired or achieved solution for this kind of problems is required to satisfy given boundary conditions. In real-world applications and their related problems, there are always some boundary conditions to meet for imitating the real case with simplified mathematical model with its boundary of initial conditions. Based on this idea, characteristic value problems of ODE and ODEs systems will always be a center of attention of scientific research.

Characteristic value problems are a subset of boundary value problems because the governing ODE is a boundary value problem, except in characteristic value problems we are also concerned with the characteristic value, or eigenvalue, that governs the behavior of the boundary value problem.

The main focus of this special issue will be on the novel numerical and soft computing methods and approaches which will have potential value for researchers of characteristic value problems of ODE and ODEs systems and general characteristic value problems. The special issue will become an international forum for researchers to summarize the most recent developments and ideas in the field, with a special emphasis given to research results obtained within the last five years. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Vibration analysis
• Stability analysis
• Sturm-Liouville problems
• Heat transfer
• Elasticity
• Computational mechanics
• Computational mathematics
• Computational statistics
• Production engineering
• Logistics
• Management engineering
• Quality management systems
• Multivariate analysis
• Customer satisfaction
• Evaluation
• Compositional data

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/mpe/odes/ according to the following timetable: