In the fall of 1992 a conference honoring Elwood S. Buffa was held at the Anderson Graduate School of Management of the University of California, Los Angeles. This book is a collection of the work presented at that conference. The scholars who gathered to honor El are the prominent researchers in the field of Operations Management. Their collective work published in this book represents the richness of the field and provides the reader with valuable insights into its important issues and problems. While any grouping of the articles by these distinguished scholars will be arbitrary, I have organized the book in four sections. In the first section the articles dealing with the strategic issues in Operations Management are compiled. The articles deal with continuous improvement, quality, services, supply chain management, and creating value through operations. The articles that explore the interface of Operations Management with other functional areas, e.g. engineering and marketing, are grouped in the second section. The third section of the book contains articles that attempt to model some important planning problems that arise in the management of production and operations. Some of the papers in this section provide state of the art reviews of selected topic areas. Finally, the fourth section contains articles that deal with future directions for Operations Management. The authors offer several insights into the future evolution of the field. The book begins with the keynote address given by El Buffa at the start of the conference on November 2, 1991.

Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing (GT/CM) have been widely-researched areas in the past 15 years and much progress has been made in all branches of GT/CM. Resulting from this research activity has been a proliferation of techniques for part-machine grouping, engineering data bases, expert system-based design methods for identifying part families, new analytical and simulation tools for evaluating performance of cells, new types of cell incorporating robotics and flexible automation, team-based approaches for organizing the work force and much more; however, the field lacks a careful compilation of this research and its outcomes. The editors of this book have commissioned leading researchers and implementers to prepare specific treatments of topics for their special areas of expertise in this broad-based philosophy of manufacturing. The editors have sought to be global both in coverage of topic matters and contributors. Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing addresses the needs and interests of three groups of individuals in the manufacturing field: academic researchers, industry practitioners, and students. (1) The book provides an up-to-date perspective, incorporating the advances made in GT/CM during the past 15 years. As a natural extension to this research, it synthesizes the latest industry practices and outcomes to guide research to greater real-world relevance. (2) The book makes clear the foundations of GT/CM from the core elements of new developments which are aimed at reducing developmental and manufacturing lead times, costs, and at improving business quality and performance. (3) Finally, the book can be used as a textbook for graduate students in engineering and management for studying the field of Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing.

In today's business environment, reliability and maintenance drastically affect the three key elements of competitiveness - quality, cost, and product lead time. Well-maintained machines hold tolerances better, help reduce scrap and rework, and raise consistency and quality of the part in addition to cutting total production costs. Today, many factories are still performing maintenance on equipment in a reactive manner due to a lack of understanding about machine performance behaviour. To improve production efficiency, computer-aided maintenance and diagnostic methodology must be applied effectively in manufacturing. This book focuses on the fundamental principles of predictive maintenance and diagnostic engineering. In addition to covering the relevant theory, techniques and methodologies in maintenance engineering, the book also provides numerous case studies and examples illustrating the successful application of the principles and techniques outlined.

Scheduling theory is an important branch of operations research. Problems studied within the framework of that theory have numerous applications in various fields of human activity. As an independent discipline scheduling theory appeared in the middle of the fifties, and has attracted the attention of researchers in many countries. In the Soviet Union, research in this direction has been mainly related to production scheduling, especially to the development of automated systems for production control. In 1975 Nauka ("Science") Publishers, Moscow, issued two books providing systematic descriptions of scheduling theory. The first one was the Russian translation of the classical book Theory of Scheduling by American mathematicians R. W. Conway, W. L. Maxwell and L. W. Miller. The other one was the book Introduction to Scheduling Theory by Soviet mathematicians V. S. Tanaev and V. V. Shkurba. These books well complement each other. Both. books well represent major results known by that time, contain an exhaustive bibliography on the subject. Thus, the books, as well as the Russian translation of Computer and Job-Shop Scheduling Theory edited by E. G. Coffman, Jr., (Nauka, 1984) have contributed to the development of scheduling theory in the Soviet Union. Many different models, the large number of new results make it difficult for the researchers who work in related fields to follow the fast development of scheduling theory and to master new methods and approaches quickly.

This book concentrates on the quality of electronic products. Electronics in general, including semiconductor technology and software, has become the key technology for wide areas of industrial production. In nearly all expanding branches of industry electronics, especially digital electronics, is involved. And the spread of electronic technology has not yet come to an end. This rapid development, coupled with growing competition and the shorter innovation cycle, have caused economic problems which tend to have adverse effects on quality. Therefore, good quality at low cost is a very attractive goal in industry today. The demand for better quality continues along with a demand for more studies in quality assurance. At the same time, many companies are experiencing a drop in profits just when better quality of their products is essential in order to survive against the competition. There have been many proposals in the past to improve quality without increase in cost, or to reduce cost for quality assurance without loss of quality. This book tries to summarize the practical content of many of these proposals and to give some advice, above all to the designer and manufacturer of electronic devices. It mainly addresses practically minded engineers and managers. It is probably of less interest to pure scientists. The book covers all aspects of quality assurance of components used in electronic devices. Integrated circuits (lCs) are considered to be the most important components because the degree of integration is still rising.

A profound and frank analysis of the problems arising from the impact of free market globalization in CIS countries. Possible new solutions are presented and discussed, especially those based on the key role of innovation. A new, original proposal is made for the development of a `common technological language', starting from a European standardization of computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM).

1. 1 Motivations Deciding is a very complex and difficult task. Some people even argue that our ability to make decisions in complex situations is the main feature that distinguishes us from animals (it is also common to say that laughing is the main difference). Nevertheless, when the task is too complex or the interests at stake are too important, it quite often happens that we do not know or we are not sure what to decide and, in many instances, we resort to a decision support technique: an informal one-we toss a coin, we ask an oracle, we visit an astrologer, we consult an expert, we think-or a formal one. Although informal decision support techniques can be of interest, in this book, we will focus on formal ones. Among the latter, we find some well-known decision support techniques: cost-benefit analysis, multiple criteria decision analysis, decision trees, . . . But there are many other ones, sometimes not presented as decision support techniques, that help making decisions. Let us cite but a few examples. * When the director of a school must decide whether a given student will pass or fail, he usually asks each teacher to assess the merits of the student by means of a grade. The director then sums the grades and compares the result to a threshold. * When a bank must decide whether a given client will obtain a credit or not, a technique, called credit scoring, is often used.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the leading sponsor of basic academic research in engineering, and its influence far exceeds its budget. We think NSF is at its best when it uses that influence to focus interest within the researcher community on critical new challenges and technologies. NSF's Scalable Enterprise Systems (SES) initiative, for which we were responsible in our successive terms in the division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation (DMII), was just such a venture. A collaborative effort spanning NSF's engineering and computer science directorates, SES sought to concentrate the energies of the academic engineering research community on developing a science base for designing, planning and controlling the extended, spatially and managerially distributed enterprises that have become the norm in the manufacture, distribution and sale of the products of U. S. industry. The of associated issues addressed included everything from management supply chains, to product design across teams of collaborating companies, to e-marketing and make-to-order manufacturing, to the information technology challenges of devising inter-operable planning and control tools that can scale with exploding enterprise size and scope. A total of 27 teams with nearly 100 investigators were selected from the 89 submitted proposals in the Phase I, exploratory part of the effort (see the list below). Seven of these were awarded larger multi-year grants to continue their research in Phase II. As the contents of this book amply illustrate, these investigations continue to flourish, with and without direct NSF support.

This volume originates from two workshops, both focusing on themes that are reflected in the title of the volume. The first workshop took place at Eindhoven University of Technology, April 24-26, 2001, on the occasion of the University granting a doctorate honoris causa to Profes sor John A. Buzacott. The second workshop was held on June 15, 2002 at Cornell University (preceding the annual INFORMSjMSOM Confer ence), honoring John's retirement and his lifetime contributions. Each of the two workshops consisted of about a dozen technical presentations. The objective of the volume, however, is not to simply publish the proceedings of the two workshops. Rather, our objective is to put to gether a select set of articles, each organized into a well-written chapter, focusing on a timely topic. Collected into a single volume, these chapters aim to serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners alike, and also as reading materials for graduate courses or seminars.

Manufacturing industries are devoted to producing high-quality products in the most economical and timely manner. Quality, economics, and time not only indicate the customer-satisfaction level, but also measure the manufacturing per formance of a company. Today's manufacturing environments are becoming more and more complex, flexible, and information-intensive. Companies invest into the information technologies such as computers, communication networks, sensors, actuators, and other equipment that give them an abundance of information about their materials and resources. In the face of global competition, a manufacturing company's survival is becoming more dependent on how best this influx of in formation is utilized. Consequently, there evolves a great need for sophisticated tools of performance analysis that use this information to help decision makers in choosing the right course of action. These tools will have the capability of data analysis, modeling, computer simulation, and optimization for use in designing products and processes. International competition also has had its impact on manufacturing education and the government's support of it in the US. We see more courses offered in this area in industrial engineering and manufacturing systems engineering departments, operations research programs, and business schools. In fact, we see an increasing number of manufacturing systems engineering departments and manufacturing research centers in universities not only in the US but also in Europe, Japan, and many developing countries."

Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth addresses measurement issues and techniques in agricultural productivity analysis, applying those techniques to recently published data sets for American agriculture. The data sets are used to estimate and explain state level productivity and efficiency differences, and to test different approaches to productivity measurement. The rise in agricultural productivity is the single most important source of economic growth in the U.S. farm sector, and the rate of productivity growth is estimated to be higher in agriculture than in the non-farm sector. It is important to understand productivity sources and to measure its growth properly, including the effects of environmental externalities.

Both the methods and the data can be accessed by economists at the state level to conduct analyses for their own states. In a sense, although not explicitly, the book provides a guide to using the productivity data available on the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service. It should be of interest to a broad spectrum of professionals in academia, the government, and the private sector.

In two volumes, Planning Production and Inventories in the Extended Enterprise: A State of the Art Handbook examines production planning across the extended enterprise against a backdrop of important gaps between theory and practice. The early chapters describe the multifaceted nature of production planning problems and reveal many of the core complexities. The middle chapters describe recent research on theoretical techniques to manage these complexities. Accounts of production planning system currently in use in various industries are included in the later chapters. Throughout the two volumes there are suggestions on promising directions for future work focused on closing the gaps.

More than forty years have passed since the early attempts to model projects. A large domain of theoretical developments has grown producing a high number of analytical and numerical results, but it seems that the main model is still the same: the concept of project network. This concept has come to represent the two major features underlying the notion of a project: the sequential and the competitive nature of its components, the project's activities. Actually, the sequential property defines the structure of the project and the competitive nature stems from the use of common resources (facilities, goods, equipment, management, etc.) to carry out the different activities. However, significant advances have been achieved in project modelling, allowing the production of much more powerful results: A. the concept of precedence and the description of activities has been generalized to produce a wide range of realistic representation of projects. B. the stochastic study of the features of projects such as the duration and cost of their activities is carried out by several analytical and numerical models, allowing experimental and forecasting analyses. C. the allocation of resources can be now studied for more complex situations and restrictions. D. the financial description of projects is more accurately studied and its optimization is thoroughly pursued. E. the assessment and the evaluation of projects now can be studied within the framework of multicriteria decision theory considering multiple perspectives and supporting the project manager to select the most appropriate compromises between risk, time and expected gains.

Through a series of case studies and surveys, the authors examine current sustainability trends in outsourcing and recommend how providers should prepare for increasing buyer demands in this area, suggesting buyers and providers can work together to build successful outsourcing relationships through collaborative sustainability projects.

An increasing interest to scheduling theory can be attributed to the high level of automation of all branches of human activity. The quality of modern production essentially depends on the planning decisions taken at different stages of a production process. Moreover, while the quality of these decisions is improving, the time and flexibility requirements for decision-making are becoming more important. All this stimulates scheduling research. Started as an independent discipline in the early fifties, it now has become an important branch of operations research. In the eighties, the largest Russian publishing house for scientific literature Nauka Publishers, Moscow, issued two books by a group of Byelorussian mathematicians: Scheduling Theory. Single-Stage Systems by V. S. Tanaev, V. S. Gordon and Y. M. Shafransky (1984) and Scheduling Theory. Multi-Stage Systems by V. S. Tanaev, Y. N. Sotskov and V. A. Strusevich (1989). Originally published in Russian, these two books cover two different major problem areas of scheduling theory and can be considered as a two-volume monograph that provides a systematic and comprehensive exposition of the subject. The authors are grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers for creating the opportunity to publish the English translations of these two books. We are indebted to M. Hazewinkel, J. K. Lenstra, A. H. G. Rinnooy Kan, D. B. Shmoys and W. Szwarc for their supporting the idea of translating the books into English.

Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable units. This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia, and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.

Analysis of Manufacturing Enterprises presents a unified and systematic treatment of manufacturing enterprises. These enterprises are networks of companies working in partnership. Such networks are a common occurrence in auto, grocery, apparel, computer and other industries; and competition is among enterprises rather than between individual companies. Thus, for these enterprises (global or local) to succeed, there is a need for systematically designing the enterprise-wide value delivery processes such as the order-to-delivery process, supply chain process, and new product development process. This calls for developing systematic analysis methodologies for evaluating the performance of value delivering processes. Analysis of Manufacturing Enterprises fills this vital need. The first part of the book focuses on foundations of manufacturing enterprises: the generic value delivery process, their performance measures and redesign to meet specifications on lead time and defect levels. The second part provides a clear and comprehensive discussion on new product development, order to delivery, and supply chain processes, which are core processes of a manufacturing enterprise. Analysis of Manufacturing Enterprises is an excellent resource for researchers and professionals in the field of manufacturing engineering.

method enables readers to: *efficiently design higher-quality, lower cost objects with less metal requirements, vibration and noise, and with lower dynamic loads and energy consumption *determine optimal solutions, regardless of the number of criteria involved, and to identify relationships among different criteria and between criteria and design variables *accurately account for discrepancies between theoretical and actual characteristics, using a special set of adequacy criteria *determine optimal design variables for complex finite element models In addition, the book helps readers: *enhance the potential of the PSI method with theoretical investigations and algorithms for approximating the feasible solutions set and Pareto optimal set *facilitate proficient problem-solving by incorporating recently obtained results from the theory of uniformly distributed sequences *evaluate design procedures by observing examples ranging from machine tools and agricultural equipment to automobiles and aviation This practical, in-depth treatment of multicriteria optimization and engineering is essential for engineers and designers working in research and development of manufacturing machines, mechanisms and structures. It is also an important text for students of applied mathematics, mechanical engineering, optimal control and operations research.

Software drives innovation and success in today's business world. Yet critical software projects consistently come in late, defective, and way over budget. So what's the problem? Get ready for a shock, because the answer to the problem is to avoid reality altogether. A new IT practice and technology called Service Virtualization (SV) is industrializing the process of simulating everything in our software development and test environments. Yes, fake systems are even better than the real thing for most of the design and development lifecycle, and SV is already making a huge impact at some of the world's biggest companies. Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated is the first book to present this powerful new method for simulating the behavior, data, and responsiveness of specific components in complex applications. By faking out dependency constraints, SV delivers dramatic improvements in speed, cost, performance, and agility to the development of enterprise application software.Writing for executive and technical readers alike, SV inventor John Michelsen and Jason English capture lessons learned from the first five years of applying this game-changing practice in real customer environments. Other industries--from aviation to medicine--already understand the power of simulation to solve real-world constraints and deliver new products to market better, faster, and cheaper. Now it's time to apply the same thinking to our software. What you'll learnYou will learn why, when, where, and how to deploy service virtualization (SV) solutions to mitigate or eliminate the constraints of an unavailable or unready service system by simulating its dependent components in order to deliver better enterprise software faster and at lower cost.In particular, you will learn step-by-step why, when, where, and how to deploy the following SV solutions: shift-left infrastructure availability performance readiness test scenario management Who this book is for This book is not only for IT practitioners on engineering, testing, and environments teams engaged in the development and delivery of enterprise software, but also for executives of companies in all sectors who need to understand and implement emergent opportunities to improve the time to market and overall competitiveness of any outward-facing business strategy that has a software application component.

Process planning determines how a product is to be manufactured and is therefore a key element in the manufacturing process. It plays a major part in determining the cost of components and affects all factory activities, company competitiveness, production planning, production efficiency and product quality. It is a crucial link between design and manufacturing. There are several levels of process planning activities. Early in product engineering and development, process planning is responsible for determining the general method of production. The selected general method of production affects the design constraints. In the last stages of design, the designer has to consider ease of manufacturing in order for it to be economic. The part design data is transferred from engineering to manufacturing and process planners develop the detailed work package for manufacturing a part. Dimensions and tolerances are determined for each stage of processing of the workpiece. Process planning determines the sequence of operations and utilization of machine tools. Cutting tools, fixtures, gauges and other accessory tooling are also specified. Feeds, speeds and other parameters of the metal cutting and forming processes are determined.

This book provides a road-map to successful implementation of strategic outsourcing programmes, providing down-to-earth approaches to outsourcing decision making and programme management, based on a grass-roots understanding. A practitioner-focused book for business leaders and managers providing a holistic view of strategic outsourcing, covering the three essential pillars of success: risks, rewards and relationships. The author shows how business leaders can transform organisational business models, structures and mind-sets, taking the reader on a journey through the book's fifteen chapters, helping the reader truly grasp: the drivers for change as a result of globalisation and convergence and their impact on organisational strategies; how outsourcing can transform the various processes and functions of an organisation; the impact outsourcing is having on various industry vertical sectors; the eight foundations of successful strategic outsourcing programmes, which when combined with strategic decision-making knowledge, guarantees that organisations embarking on the strategic outsourcing journey, derive the transformational benefits they seek.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2013, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2013.

In the last decade, the interest in agile and lean software development has been continuously growing. Agile and lean have evolved from a way of working -- restricted in the beginning to a few early adopters -- to the mainstream way of developing software. All this time, the XP conference series has actively promoted agility and widely disseminated research results in this area. XP 2013 successfully continued this tradition.

The 17 full papers accepted for XP 2013 were selected from 52 submissions and are organized in sections on: teaching and learning; development teams; agile practices; experiences and lessons learned; large-scale projects; and architecture and design.

Risk management has become an essential issue in supply chain management, from the modeling of the decision maker's risk preference, and the studies on uncertain elements such as demand, supply, price, lead time, etc., to the consideration of more practical background including cash flow constraints, inventory financing and delayed cash payment. In this new volume, the authors provide a framework to study the interaction of various factors related to risk and their influence on supply chain management.

The scope of areas covered includes operations management, decision analysis, and business administration. This book focuses on several key issues of risk management in supply chains. Specifically, an analysis framework is presented for studying the supplier selection problem and identifying the optimal sourcing strategy in a one-retailer two-suppliers supply chain with random yields. The optimal sourcing strategy of a retailer and the pricing strategies of two suppliers under an environment of supply disruption are investigated. Besides, the authors study the dynamic inventory control problems with cash flow constraints, financing decisions as well as delayed cash payment. In addition, originating from the annual international iron ore price negotiation, the authors model the bargaining process to deal with the risk of wholesale price in the game analysis context.

Within the three perspectives of risk management in supply chains, the modeling of decision maker's risk preference has been extensively studied and many results have been obtained to guide the practice. However, the analysis on the other two kinds of topics is still in its infancy, and needs more efforts from academia. It is thus the ambition and innovation for this book to contribute on risk management in supply chains in the following ways:

(1) characterizing the explicit sourcing strategy (i.e., single sourcing or dual sourcing) to deal with supply disruption risk;

(2) introducing the concepts of financial risk measurement by incorporating cash flow constraints, inventory financing and delayed cash payment into inventory management models; and

(3) providing insights for the iron ore price negotiation to help steel manufacturers handle the risk of price increase.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems, HoloMAS 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2013, in conjunction with DEXA 2013. The 25 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: MAS in automation and manufacturing; design, simulation and validation; MAS in transportation systems; industrial applications; and new trends.

This book contains extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from two workshops organized by the Euro Working Group on Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS), which were held in Liverpool, UK, and Vilnius, Lithuania, in April and July 2012. From a total of 33 submissions, 9 papers were accepted for publication in this edition after being reviewed by at least three internationally known experts from the EWG-DSS Program Committee and external invited reviewers. The selected papers are representative of the current research activities in the area of decision support systems, focusing on topics such as decision analysis for enterprise systems and non-hierarchical networks, integrated solutions for decision support and knowledge management in distributed environments, decision support system evaluation and analysis through social networks, and e-learning and its application to real environments.