Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Science, Global Supply Chains, and Operations Research

I was thrilled to see the cover of the recent Science magazine published by AAAS with a feature section on "Rethinking the global supply chain."

In this volume were several themed articles that I especially enjoyed, including "The information highway gets physical," in which ideas from the existing Internet are being promulgated to create a physical Internet for more effective logistics. Personally, and since we are part of a big NSF project to reenvision the existing Internet, I also see many synergies in the reverse direction through appropriate game theory models! In that nice article, written by Jeffrey Mervis, operations researcher Russ Meller was noted, and his co-authored book, "The Physical Internet: The Network of Logistics Networks." I sent Russ a congrats yesterday and he responded en route to the airport for a flight to Europe. I also enjoyed reading quotes from Kevin Gue, who gave a keynote recently at the Physical Internet conference in Quebec City  (and who is moving from Auburn U. to the U. of Louisville). I was already committed to being in Europe in May so I did not attend. The conference was hosted by Benoit Montreuil of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada.

Kevin J. Dooley of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University also had a nice article, "The whole chain," in which he stated that Science is key to holistically managing sustainable supply chains, which I thoroughly agree with and which we have been emphasizing in many of our sustainable supply chain research articles with applications as varied as blood supply chains and even fast fashion!

In the volume there were also several additional articles on sustainable supply chains, and I found it interesting to see the lists of references and journals represented.

In particular, I very much enjoyed the article. "The science of sustainable supply chains," by Dara O'Rourke, who is at UC Berkeley. It was terrific to see cited therein our latest book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products!"
 
And speaking of supply chains, today we heard the great news that our paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, was accepted for publication in the journal, Transportation Research E! This paper was recently presented at the 18th European Conference on Mathematics for Industry, Taormina, Italy, June 9-13, 2014 and also at the Conference on Optimization, Control and Applications in the Information Age - in honor of the 60th Birthday of Professor Panos M. Pardalos, Chalkidiki, Greece, June 15-20, 2014.



You can read more about our paper in an earlier blogpost. 

The above presentation can be downloaded in its entirely here.