This special issue of RAIRO-Operations Research is dedicated to the 14th ROADEF Conference (ROADEF 2013)of the Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS) French Society, held in Troyes, Université de Technologie de Troyes (UTT) on February 13-15, 2013. Twenty-four articles were submitted to the special issue "Combinatorial Optimization in production and logistics systems". The six selected contributions are a sample of the rich diversity of studies presented in ROADEF 2013, and address the following topics: mathematical formulations for healthcare, a generalized consistent neighborhood search for satellite range scheduling problems, metaheuristics for a lot-sizing production planning problem with returns, a multi-objective exact procedure for a network design problem, and notation and classification for vehicle routing problems and network design models.