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Transforming Pulp and Paper (P&P) mills into Integrated Forest Biorefineries (IFBR) is a prominent solution to save Canadian P&P industry that has been facing decline of conventional paper demand. ...

The pulp and paper industry has significant sustainability implications and necessarily requires a careful consideration of direct and lower-tier suppliers for effective sustainable supply chain ma...

International audience; An intertwined supply network (ISN) is an entirety of interconnected supply chains (SC) which, in their integrity secure the provision of society and markets with goods and services. The ISNs are open systems with structural dynamics since the firms may exhibit multiple behaviors by changing the buyer-supplier roles in interconnected or even competing SCs. From the positions of resilience, the ISNs as a whole provide services to society (e.g., food service, mobility service or communication service) which are required to ensure a long-term survival. The analysis of survivability at the level of ISN requires a consideration at a large scale as resilience of individual SCs. The recent example of coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak clearly shows the necessity of this new perspective. Our study introduces a new angle in SC resilience research when a resistance to extraordinary disruptions needs to be considered at the scale of viability. We elaborate on the integrity of the ISN and viability. The contribution of our position study lies in a conceptualization of a novel decision-making environment of ISN viability. We illustrate the viability formation through a dynamic game-theoretic modelling of a biological system that resembles the ISN. We discuss some future research areas.

This paper introduces the background, concept and definition of the Industry Commons. It initiates a discussion on the positioning of the Industry Commons Ecosystem (ICE) with respect to current research directions in advanced manufacturing and production systems that shape advances in engineering and technology, novel business models and innovation breakthroughs. The potential value of data sharing across industrial domains is estimated at over $100 billion, particularly in view of optimising manufacturing processes. Data sharing across domains however faces a series of well-documented challenges associated with the lack of semantic interoperability and related standards, management of trust and sustainability. Solving bottlenecks in data sharing requires a systemic approach to data management, which can account for all aspects of data use, levels of application, attribution and dynamic exchanges. In this paper we propose a high-level ecosystem approach that integrates societal values with digital affordances of industry's cognitive-assisted processes, remote interfacing, hybrid applications and large-scale value networks. Early development of an Ontology Commons EcoSystem (OCES) is presented as the key enabling framework for Industry Commons interoperability and a series of enabling frameworks form the basis of future research directions in Trusted Data Sharing and Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management for greater sustainability.

This study examines a two-stage two-dimensional cutting stock problem encountered by a paper mill company. The problem includes various machine-related and operational constraints based on real-world situations. Paper products are manufactured using two major cutting processes. Each cutting machine has a specific minimum and maximum width for input and output rolls and is limited by the maximum number of rolls it can cut at the same time. A mathematical model is presented to formally address the problem and an efficient multiple-choice knapsack-based heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithm, computational experiments are conducted on test data-set generated from real-world data provided by a large paper mill company in the Republic of Korea.

This paper offers a review of the development and use of multi-agent modelling techniques and simulations in the context of manufacturing systems and supply chain management (SCM). The objective of the paper is twofold. First, it presents a comprehensive literature review of current multi-agent systems (MAS) research applications in the field of manufacturing systems and SCM. Second, it aims to identify and evaluate some key issues involved in using MAS methods to model and simulate manufacturing systems. A variety of different MAS applications are reviewed in three different classified research areas: production design and development, production planning and control, and SCM. In presenting a detailed taxonomy of MAS applications, the paper describes MAS application domains from five different perspectives. The review suggests the MAS approach represents a feasible framework for designing and analysing real-time manufacturing operations, since the approach is capable of modelling different levels of agen...

The privatisation of the Iran newsprint industry has caused an increase in production and decrease in importation. Recognition of effective criteria in newsprint privatisation will accelerate privatisation of the industry. The goal of the research is expediting privatisation in the Iran newsprint industry through benefits, costs, opportunities and risk merits. We applied analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to solve the problem plus questionnaires and pair wise comparisons of the matrices by the experts have also been done in the research. The results show a decrease of budget deficiency, national debts (economic and financial), limiting rules, heavy taxes (economic and executive), encouragement possibility, absorption of foreign, internal investment (economic and financial) and limiting regulative costs (economic and financial) which are the most important sub criteria regarding benefits, costs, opportunities and risks merits, respectively.

In this paper, we present an algorithm that solves a paper reel layout problem where the available space is divided into equal-size cells. The problem is to find a layout with the minimum transport...

To enable you to remain competitive in future, you must already start to focus your company on the task of meeting the challenges that are emerging from development trends stretching back over several years and which are becoming more apparent all the time. These trends are leading to increasing levels of complexity, dynamism and uncertainty in the corporate environment. This paper is an attempt to highlight these technological and structural developments, frequently referred to as megatrends: changes of a fundamental nature with far-reaching implications for the economy and society with attendant opportunities and threats to industry. One focal point of this paper will therefore be the fundamental developments in the microelectronics sector and their wider implications, which will necessarily lead to a consideration of the technologies of IT and telecommunications. Another aspect receiving attention here will be the problems facing industry in the wake of structural change of this magnitude as well as th...

This special issue consists of selected papers from the 3rd International Conference on Manufacturing Research (IMRC2005) held at Cranfield University on 6th – 8th September 2005, in the theme of enabling technologies and frameworks for new product development. The papers have been updated, extended and further peer reviewed and improved to the high standard of the journal. Initially 12 papers (around 10% of the total papers presented at the conference) were requested for extension and further review, and 9 papers are finally selected for inclusion in this special issue.

In this paper we present some of the recent advances in the quality and reliability engineering methodologies. These advances include change point detection, monitoring processes with correlated observations, monitoring and control of multivariate processes, integration of the statistical process control with engineering process control, accelerated life testing, degradation models, predictive maintenance, and software reliability engineering. Future directions of research in quality and reliability engineering and their challenges are also discussed.

This paper deals with the problem in designing an efficient production system where perishable raw materials are to be professed into several kinds of end-products. This model can clarify the relationship between the production capacity and the buffer inventory of end-products that are able to control, within their acceptable limits, both the decaying loss of harvested raw materials and the out-of-stock level of end-products.

The technological evolution which contributed to the early development of integrated computerized manufacturing systems (ICOMS) is presented and the significance and characteristics of U.S.A. manufacturing are illustrated. The human aspects in the design and use of manufacturing systems are outlined. Some solutions to human issues in ICOMS are mentioned.

In the material flow sector, there is a great potential for rationalization which should be taken advantage of. In this report, modular elements for automated material flow in manufacturing— particularly in flexible manufacturing cells and systems—are presented and explained in the form of concepts for systems. The technical design and the implementation of these material flow components are illustrated on the basis of flexible manufacturing systems already built or in the planning stage.

As an aid in evaluating efforts to reduce process downtime rates and to facilitate resource allocation decisions, a model of the downtime severity rate and statistical methods for estimating and evaluating two or more downtime severity rates are presented. Time down or cost per downtime incident is assumed to follow a gamma distribution. An expression for a one-sided upper statistical tolerance limit on the downtime severity rate is derived. Examples of statistical analysis using data from a paper manufacturing facility are provided.

The paper is baaed on two interlinked concepts, demonstrated by three investigations, one in England, two in Canada. When faced with the necessity to rank in order of priority a series of decisions which must be made within a finite range of choice, the ranking when arranged cumulatively by priority follows a definite pattern which can be expressed by the relationship y = axb, which is illustrated graphically as a straight line plot on log-log graph paper. In all three enquiries; one concerns the purchase of women's shoeB, one with the sorting out of the priorities within the problems of a religious organization, the third with ranking the decisions that are taken by industrial executives, in the equation y =y axb has a value of between 0·4 and 0·6. The similarity is striking. It is felt that it is only possible to discover the genuine ranking of priorities within a finite range by allowing the person concerned, man or woman, complete freedom of choice. In Case 1 there was the physical ranking i...

International audience; The boom in online sales has inspired the enthusiasm of manufacturers to include their own online sale channel with the retailer’s offline channel. This paper investigates the impact of consumer transfer in a capital-constraint dual-channel supply chain and examines the optimal operational decision by considering a Stackelberg game. We capture the trade credit coordination mechanism of the supply chain facing with stochastic demand. The results show that trade credit contract would alleviate financial pressure of the capital-constraint retailer and achieve coordination in the dual-channel supply chain. Besides, the adoption of trade credit stimulates the ordering behaviour of retailers. However, by using trade credit, the default risk increases for the capital-constraint retailer compared to the retailer with sufficient capital. The manufacturer shares the risk with the retailer by trade credit in dual-channel supply chain. Furthermore, the effects of consumer transfer rates on the setting of the trade credit parameters are also presented in this paper.

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most intensively studied combinatorial optimisation problems for which numerous models and algorithms have been proposed. To tackle the complexities, uncertainties and dynamics involved in real-world VRP applications, Machine Learning (ML) methods have been used in combination with analytical approaches to enhance problem formulations and algorithmic performance across different problem solving scenarios. However, the relevant papers are scattered in several traditional research fields with very different, sometimes confusing, terminologies. This paper presents a first, comprehensive review of hybrid methods that combine analytical techniques with ML tools in addressing VRP problems. Specifically, we review the emerging research streams on ML-assisted VRP modelling and ML-assisted VRP optimisation. We conclude that ML can be beneficial in enhancing VRP modelling, and improving the performance of algorithms for both online and offline VRP optimisations. Finally, challenges and future opportunities of VRP research are discussed., Submitted to International Journal of Production Research

It is widely recognised that performance measurement systems (PMS) are important for the management of a factory, business enterprise or public sector organisation. However, the case can be made that the development of PMS and organisational forms are inextricably linked. As the economic, technical and trading environment evolves, organisations need to adapt, and so do the measurement and management systems. In this editorial, we will retrace the history of PMS from early factory costing systems through to the multi-dimensional approaches widely used today. As the world evolves, organisations and PMS need to evolve too with the papers in this special issue reflecting this. These papers lead us to reconsider the future of PMS as climate change, the internet of things (IoT) and new technology drive us forward towards a complex and uncertain future.

International audience; This paper investigates the impacts of preferential credit policy, faced by capital constraint retailers, on coordinating the supply chain. Apart from different bank’s and manufacturer’s risk preferences, preferential credit is also affected by the retailers’ exogenous collateral. We establish the preferential credit coordinating model (PCCM) to examine the optimal decisions and coordinate the supply chain with different financing channels, such as the preferential bank loan, preferential trade credit and portfolio credit. In this paper, we conclude some critical findings. Firstly, we find that the retailer’s optimal would improve its optimal order quantity in the coordinated supply chain when he finances from a risk-pursuing bank or the manufacturer. Secondly, the retailer’s financial cost would be shared with the manufacturer whether the retailer utilises preferential trade credit or bank financing channel. Thirdly, the capital constraint retailer would prefer preferential trade credit to the other financing methods for the purpose that the preferential trade credit could improve the coordinated supply chain’s efficiency. Finally, we capture different impacts of collateral and risk preference on the supply chain. This article supplements the existing literature on supply chain finance with a preferential credit insight into the condition of the coordinated supply chain.

Supply chain finance (SCF) as a crucial approach plays a key role in improving commitment, trust, financial flows, and profitability in a supply chain (SC). Many industrial organisations finance their SC through two resources: internal financing (buyer) and external financing (bank). The main objective of this paper is to develop an advanced data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for measuring the sustainability of financing resources of Industry 4.0 technologies. To do so, for the first time a non-radial DEA model in the presence of both zero inputs and ratio data is proposed. In this paper, the sustainability factors, including economic, environmental, and social factors are incorporated into the proposed approach. The developed DEA model, for the first time, is applied in SCF. The results show the most sustainable financial resource for investing in Industry 4.0 technologies. Also, the inputs and outputs’ inefficiencies are determined.

Artificial lighting is a constant companion in everyday private and working life, influencing visibility in interior spaces as well as outdoors. In recent years, new technical solutions have extended traditional lighting systems to become ‘smart’. Different types of smart lighting systems are available on the market today, and researchers have concentrated on analysing their usability and efficiency, especially for private households, office buildings and public streets. This paper presents a systematic literature review to analyse the state-of-knowledge of technologies and applications for smart lighting systems. The results of the review show that smart lighting systems have been frequently discussed in the literature, but that their potentials in industrial environments, such as production and logistics, has rarely been addressed in the literature so far. Lighting systems for industrial environments often have very different requirements depending on the working environment and operating conditions. Based on the results of the literature review, this paper contributes to closing this research gap by discussing the usage potential of smart lighting systems to improve the efficiency of warehouse order picking, which is an application that may benefit from various functions smart lighting systems provide. Several propositions are developed that emphasise research opportunities and managerial implications in this context.

Kitting is a materials-feeding principle commonly used with mixed-model assembly, but literature is lacking with respect to how kit quality can be supported. The purpose of this paper is to create an understanding of the links between kit preparation design aspects and kit preparation error types, that can be useful to support kit quality. The paper draws on empirical data from a multiple case study in the automotive industry to study how typical kit errors are linked to eight kit preparation design aspects: location, work organisation, storage policy, batching policy, storage packaging, kit carrier and container, picking information system, and error communication. The findings suggest several opportunities related to kit preparation design aspects for preventing kit errors and facilitating kit error corrections. The paper extends earlier knowledge and can support kit quality of industrial kit preparation.

International audience; This paper provides a systematic review and analysis of the game-theroy-based research in Green Supply Chains Management (GSCM). Based on a rigorous content analysis of 108 papers carefully selected from the literature, we present a detailed picture of the current state of this research and point to the promising future directions. Our analysis shows a rapid increase in the number of publications during the last three years, with an imbalance in the contribution of the publishing outlets, as nearly two third of the reviewed papers are published by only four journals. Results also show the dominance of deterministic static models and simple two-level SC structures. Developing stochastic models, considering the risk and the evolutionary nature that inherently characterise the business environment and investigating more complex multi-level SC structures are among the promising future research opportunities.

This paper introduces the integrated disassembly line balancing and routing problem (I-DLB-RP). The I-DLB-RP simultaneously optimises two well-known problems. The former one balances the disassembly lines in the disassembly centres, whereas the latter one constructs a routing plan to distribute the usable components, generated by the disassembly process, from disassembly centre to the remanufacturing centres, i.e. customers. With the increasing importance of the disassembly process for tackling with the burden of waste and the number of disassembled products, the distribution planning of usable components released after the disassembly process becomes essential. This paper considers several scenarios: single-component distribution, multi-component distribution, inventory cost, and multi-period conditions. We propose five linear and non-linear mathematical models. Extensive computational experiments conducted on generated realistic benchmark instances. The analyses quantify the benefits of integrating the two problems.

This paper deals with a hierarchical solution approach for multi-objective optimisation of an autonomous vehicle-based storage and retrieval system (AVS/RS) warehouse design. As a result of recent technological and Industry 4.0 developments, industries tend to automise their facilities using systems such as AVS/RS, an intra-logistics system, mostly utilised by large distribution centres. Compared to a traditional crane-based automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS), these systems are more advantageous for having a flexible travel pattern of autonomous vehicles, enabling the designer vary the number of vehicles in the system based on the changed demand environment. Since it may affect the initial and operational costs as well as the system efficiency significantly, it is important to decide on the right warehouse design at first for these systems. In this paper, a multi-objective optimisation solution procedure under a hierarchical approach for the design of an AVS/RS, by considering minimisation of two conflicting performance measures - average cycle time and average energy consumption per transaction - is presented. By this work, it is also aimed to attract the attention of practitioners for the significance of multi-objective performance optimisation. For the multi-objective optimisation, Pareto-optimal solutions are presented.

The supply chain collaboration has gained significant attention, especially in the presence of disruptions. This paper presents findings from a systematic literature review to answer the question: how collaborations help supply chains respond and recover from a disruption. A total of 157 papers from the year 2000 were studied. The thematic and descriptive analysis identified usefulness, used research methodologies, collaboration mechanisms, and influential factors in collaboration. This comprehensive review provides in-depth insights into the current state of literature, proposes a research framework, and identifies several future research directions. It also highlights the role of each collaboration mechanism based on each severity level of disruptions.

Recently, industrial and academic communities in the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) field are paying increasing attention to social media. However, the value of social media in OSCM is quite unclear, and more investigations are still needed. To pave the way for a directed future research, this paper systematically reviewed and synthesised 152 peer-review journal papers to identify research focus and gaps in this area, supported by an appropriate conceptual framework. The result reveals that the research interests in this area have increased dramatically within the last decade across various industries and regions. Different companies’ OSCM activities, such as sourcing and delivery, can benefit from employment of social media. This paper also indicates that future research can explore the value of social media in sourcing, delivery, product return and reverse logistics activities, forecasting and inventory management, and product development and production.

Changeable manufacturing and platform-based co-development of products and manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly relevant for industrial manufacturing in order to respond to volatile markets, increased product variety and shorter product life cycles. However, in order to conduct platform-based co-development, it is necessary to manage the relations between the product domain and the manufacturing domain. This paper proposes an approach and meta-model for developing company-specific ontologies, which can be used for modelling the portfolio of components, processes and equipment and their interrelations as a basis for co-evolution. Developing such a model has implications for developing and utilising changeable manufacturing, which is also analysed in this paper.

In this paper, we examine a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and retailer where the manufacturer undertakes greening efforts in terms of pack-size reduction and transportation cost reduction. The retailer decides on shelf-space allocation for the product. Both the players benefit from the greening efforts of the manufacturer. In such a setting, we examine strategic decisions of the players and compare and contrast the performance of the decentralised supply chain with the centralised supply chain. We also examine the effect of collaborative mechanisms by modelling two contracts in which the retailer offers a transportation cost reduction effort based contract and a two-part tariff contract. We find that the decentralised supply chain leads to lower greening efforts and shelf-space allocation decisions. We also find that the contracts improve pack-size reduction effort, transportation cost reduction effort and shelf-space allocation, while also improving the profitability of individual players. The findings demonstrate a scope for supply chain collaboration between manufacturer–retailer pairs in this setting. The paper uniquely combines three critical elements in supply chains, namely, product design, transportation and retailing decisions, and aims to provide insights into the decision making of players considering environmental waste and pollution. The paper also reflects consumer behavior and trade-offs that the supply chain players face.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a key for implementing circular economy. Through IS, wastes produced by one company are used as inputs by other companies. The operations of IS suffers from uncertainty barriers since wastes are not produced upon demand but emerge as secondary outputs. Such an uncertainty, triggered by waste supply-demand quantity mismatch, influences IS business dynamics. Accordingly, companies have difficulty to foresee potential costs and benefits of implementing IS. The paper adopts an enterprise input-output model providing a cost–benefit analysis of IS integrated to an agent-based model to simulate how companies share the total economic benefits stemming from IS. The proposed model allows to explore the space of cooperation, defined as the operationally favourable conditions to operate IS in an economically win-win manner. This approach, as a decision-support tool, allows the user to understand whether the IS relationship is created and how should the cost-sharing policy be. The proposed model is applied to a numerical example. Findings show that cost-sharing strategies are dramatically affected by waste supply-demand mismatch and by the relationship between saved and additional costs to run IS. Apart from methodological and theoretical contributions, the paper proposes managerial and practical implications for business strategy development in IS.

International audience; Horizontal collaboration has been considered as effective practice for sustainable logistics and freight transport and it has gained increased attention in recent years. This paper aims to provide a survey of the development of horizontal collaborative transport (HCT) over the past ten years, to identify research trends and gaps, then to propose some research opportunities. The paper also aims to provide guidelines to logistics companies who wish to embark on HCT, to help them choose which HCT solution to implement. To provide a comprehensive and structured review, the paper follows the methodology in the literature. A total of 120 scientific papers published between 2007 and 2017 were reviewed. A survey framework based on two axes-HCT solutions and implementation issues-is developed to analyse and position the papers. The results show that, regarding HCT solutions, carrier alliance and flow controller collaboration were the most frequently studied. But recent innovative solutions such as pooling and physical internet are also gaining increased attention. Regarding implementation issues, the focus of the literature has been on the development of decision-making models, including transport planning, lane exchange, and gain sharing. Conversely, managerial and technological issues have received less attention.

© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Addressing the materials feeding principle of kitting, commonly applied in the materials supply to mass-customised assembly, the current paper has the purpose of exploring how the man-hour efficiency of kit preparation is affected by the design and the context of the kit preparation. The study presented in the paper is based on a comprehensive methodology, comprising several steps and considering a large set of qualitative as well as quantitative data from 15 case studies. It also utilises the expertise of practitioners from the industry. The paper provides a valuable addition to the existing literature where empirical evidence is scarce. From a practical perspective, it offers support to the design of man-hour efficient kit preparation systems. The findings show that the design and the context of the kit preparation system can have a decisive, yet complex, impact on the man-hour efficiency and, thereby, on an assessment of the applicability of kitting. The paper identifies several important aspects of both design and context and indicates how these aspects are linked to the man-hour efficiency of kit preparation.

This paper presents an inventory management policy for a retailer offering a layaway programme. Layaway is a service provided by retailers that allows budget constrained consumers who have sufficiently high valuations to pay for a product in several instalments rather than at once and obtain the product that has been reserved for them at the end of the payment period. If a consumer defaults on payments, then the reserved item is released back into store inventory. In this paper, we first determine the retailer's optimal order decisions when layaway is offered. We find that the order quantity under a layaway programme decreases with the likelihood of consumers not finishing their layaway plans and that it is not always profitable for a retailer to offer a layaway programme. We then identify the market conditions under which the retailer would benefit from a layaway programme. Lastly, we consider an extension to capture the influence of the timing of consumer defaults.

International audience; City logistics is one of the significant branches of supply chain management, dealing with the logistics and transportation activities in urban areas. This research area has recently appropriated an exponential growth of publications. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis along with a systematic literature review to organise the results of surveying more than 370 papers and research works published since 2010. We identify the top contributing research topics. The most common keywords used in the city logistics literature are referred to in order to propose six research categories identifying the main innovative research perspectives.

Reverse Logistics and Closed Loop Supply Chain Management (RL&CLSCM) are universally recognised as two environmentally friendly practices that could help in greening conventional supply chains. The popularity of these fields of research has led to the evolution of a vast number of publications in the literature. Various journals have so far contributed to the advancement of the field, with the International Journal of Production of Research (IJPR) being one of the most prominent contributed journals. To celebrate the 55th volume anniversary of IJPR, this review study aims to investigate the studies in the area of RL&CLSCM published in IJPR. The paper presents a thorough bibliometric and content analysis of 94 studies that were published in IJPR from 2000 until July 2017. The studies initially underwent a rigorous bibliometric and mapping analysis that helped to identify their characteristics. Subsequently, the contents of the sample papers were evaluated thoroughly. The content analysis led to classification of the papers into two main categories and sub-categories, and then to rigorous identification of the papers’ attributes. The bibliometric and content analysis disclosed several research gaps that remain to be addressed in IJPR.

Many production systems are multistate, with a finite number of performance levels that are between perfect functioning and complete failure. Importance measures are often used in the maintenance planning of complicated systems, to observe the criticalities of components, reveal the system weakness, and thus to guide the allocation of limited maintenance resources. This paper compares several commonly used importance measures for multistate systems, and investigates their effectiveness and limitations with a simple example. These existing measures focus on the states of a system at some moment, while ignoring the dynamic behaviours in the long-term. For a production system, however, its throughput in a certain period, rather than the instantaneous performance, is the system property of interest. Therefore, two new long-term throughput-based importance measures: total throughput importance measure and maintenance effect importance measure are proposed in this paper, to answer the questions about the criticalities of different components and the long-term effects of successful maintenance activities on the throughput of a production system in a certain period. A case study on an offshore production system is conducted, to illustrate how the new importance measures work and what kind of implications can be provided to the maintenance crew. This is an [Original Manuscript] of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [International Journal of Production Research] on [28 Feb 2018], available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2018.1442947

Existing studies on disaster relief operations (DRO) pay limited attention to acts of spontaneous volunteerism by local citizens in the aftermath of disasters. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social preferences motivate citizens to help during post-disaster situations; above and beyond their own self-regarding interests. The paper begins by synthesizing the literature on social preferences from the field of behavioral economics and social psychology with the discourse surrounding behavioral operations management and humanitarian operations management (HOM). By doing so, we identify the motivators, enablers and barriers of local citizen response during disaster relief operations. These factors inform a theoretical framework of the social preferences motivating spontaneous volunteerism in post-disaster situations. We evidence facets of the framework using archival and unstructured data retrieved from Twitter feeds generated by local citizens during the floods that hit Chennai, India in 2015. Our model highlights the importance of individual level action during disaster relief operations and the enabling role of social media as a coordination mechanism for such efforts.

In the past 10 years, ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) has received a growing amount of attention among researchers in the manufacturing community because ubiquitous computing technologies (UCTs) can be applied to address a wide range of issues in the manufacturing industry, e.g. manufacturing processes and equipment, manufacturing management and planning. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive and critical review from a holistic view of the state-of-the-art UM and its systems. This paper aims to provide a concise overview of the technical features, characteristics and broad range of applications of UM systems published between 1997 and 2017. Among these selected articles, more than 70% of them were published between 2012 and 2017, and they are considered as recent pertinent works which will be discussed in detail. The unique aspects of this paper lie in that this paper summarises and analyses a broad range of the state-of-the-art implementation of UM systems from a ...

In this paper, we present an extension of the classic p-median facility location model. The new formulation allows the user to trace the trade-off between the demand-weighted average distance (the traditional p-median objective) and the range in assigned demand. We extend the model to incorporate additional constraints that significantly reduce the computation time associated with the model. We also outline a genetic algorithm-based approach for solving the problem. The paper shows that significant reductions in the range in assigned demand are possible with relatively minor degradations in the average distance metric. The paper also shows that the genetic algorithm does very well at identifying the approximate trade-off curve. The model and algorithms were tested on real-life data-sets ranging in size from 33 nodes to 880 nodes.

In this paper, we define the business model of a company and its eight main components which are the customer value proposition, profit formula, partner network, the other four business model pillars include supply/service chain processes; key resources; delivery mechanisms and institutional and social constraints and finally the operational governance. The business model achieves the objective of making money by producing the products/services using the resources following the social and institutional constraints and delivering to various customer segments the products and services using all the sales opportunities including to the primary, secondary customers and cross-sales. We call this framework as the business model ecosystem. Then, we map the unified ecosystem for a unified company and illustrate using several examples. Our business model ecosystem is a generalised version of the business models published in the literature. We then present the GRIP (Governance, Risk, Innovation and Performance) framework. We present some of the example both established and new to illustrate our framework. We compare the traditional retail and e-retail in terms of their business models and discuss the issues involved in business model change. The takeaways from this paper are opportunities for both research and start-ups.

This paper proposes a scheduling strategy for irregular curved blocks to address the complex spatiotemporal coupling scheduling problem related to the entered time, the entered sequence, the setting positions and the rotated angles for the curved blocks in a shipbuilding yard. The strategy presents a makespan-based curved blocks – classification and selection rule to fulfil the programming time for the entry of the curved blocks into the workplace and realises the suppression on the delay. Useless stepping search of curved blocks in occupied workplace is avoided by combining the lowest centre-of-gravity rule with the calculation method of the remained workplace proposed in this paper. A modified genetic ant colony algorithm was proposed, which apply the ease to premature characteristics of GA and the excellent local optimisation ability of ACO, to let and promote the algorithm falls into local optimum. Then the large-scale and full-range mutation will be implemented to make the algorithm jump out of the original local optimisation to search more local optimal solutions so that the global optimal solution can be achieved. Finally, a software system for algorithm verification was developed which conducts the comparative analysis of the algorithms and verifies the validity of the algorithm proposed.

Knowledge management can be viewed as the ability to identify, store and retrieve knowledge. This paper presents a view of four perspectives of IJPR papers related to knowledge management, focusing on the specific perspectives related to information systems, computer software and analytics support of supply chain management. IJPR publications since 2006 that used these key terms are included in a primitive network analysis of these papers. A dichotomy of knowledge management into information systems versus quantitative analysis is detected, with some minimal overlap. This analysis elaborates the evolution of both analytics and information systems in knowledge management. The network is also viewed from specific relation to three fields considered important now and in the near future: sustainability, multiple criteria decision-making and supply chain risk management. The intent is to identify a view of the state-of-the-art of IJPR published research related to knowledge management in supply chains.

Taleizadeh, Noori-daryan, and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam consider pricing and ordering decisions in a three-level supply chain with defective items and inspection processes in their paper published in 2015. They examine three scenarios for defective items at the manufacturer: disposal, rework and selling at a lower price. Unfortunately, this interesting and innovative paper suffers from some shortcomings that are addressed in our note.

In the digital economy, the volume, variety and availability of data produced in myriad forms from a diversity of sources has become an important resource for competitive advantage, innovation opportunity as well as source of new management challenges. Building on the theoretical and empirical foundations of the traditional manufacturing Supply Chain (SC), which describes the flow of physical artefacts as raw materials through to consumption, we propose the Data Supply Chain (DSC) along which data are the primary artefact flowing. The purpose of this paper is to outline the characteristics and bring conceptual distinctiveness to the context around DSC as well as to explore the associated and emergent management challenges and innovation opportunities. To achieve this, we adopt the systematic review methodology drawing on the operations management and supply chain literature and, in particular, taking a framework synthetic approach which allows us to build the DSC concept from the pre-existing SC template. We conclude the paper by developing a set of propositions and outlining an agenda for future research that the DSC concept implies.

This paper presents an assessment method to measure the lean transformation (LT) stage of an LT enterprise. Although there are many assessment tools to measure the various aspects of lean practices in enterprises, there is none to measure the stage of LT using the enterprise transformation characteristics from enterprise level. In this paper, the characteristic metrics and characteristic model of LT cycle were extracted from the basic capacity, process power and transformation results. Then, an assessment approach based on fuzzy nearness degree and TOPSIS is proposed to determine the stage of LT. Finally, an example is shown to highlight the procedure of the proposed method. This paper shows that the proposed model is very well suited as an assessment tool for enterprises in the manufacturing industry and other industries to evaluate the LT stage.

Pre-existing knowledge buried in manufacturing enterprises can be reused to help decision-makers develop good judgements to make decisions about the problems in new product development, which in turn speeds up and improves the quality of product innovation. This paper presents a graph-based approach to knowledge reuse for supporting knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. The paper first illustrates the iterative process of knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. Then, a novel framework is proposed to facilitate this process, where knowledge maps and knowledge navigation are involved. Here, OWL ontologies are employed to construct knowledge maps, which appropriately capture and organise knowledge resources generated at various stages of product lifecycle; the Personalised PageRank algorithm is used to perform knowledge navigation, which finds the most relevant knowledge in knowledge maps for a given problem in new product development. Finally, the feasibility and ...