The scheduling of production systems is a widely investigated branch of the operational research domain. Scheduling, in general, can be seen as the allocation of limited resources to tasks in order to optimize a certain objective function. Machine scheduling, in particular, refers to problems in a manufacturing environment where jobs have to be scheduled for processing on one or more machines to optimize one or more objectives. Within the machine scheduling field there is a large variety of problem types, based on the characteristics of the jobs, the restrictions of the process and the objectives to be optimized. By means of doctoral research at the OR&S group, several machine scheduling problems, ranging from the single machine environment to the multi-stage job shop environment (i.e. single and parallel machine scheduling problems, traditional and flexible job shop scheduling problems, etc...), with varying job characteristics, process restrictions and objective functions, were investigated. For these problems, various algorithmic optimization approaches were developed, and resulted in the following research papers: