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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Workshop on E-Business (WEB 2011), held in Shanghai, China, on December 4, 2011. The 40 papers, which were selected from 88 submissions to the workshop, touch on topics that are diverse yet highly relevant to the challenges faced by today's e-business researchers and practitioners. They are organized in topical sections on social networks, business intelligence, and social computing; economics and organizational implications of electronic markets; and e-business systems and applications.

Provides an updated view of knowledge management strategies of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) by focusing on how those firms manage innovation in their value chains and at the territorial level. Offers an original analysis of key processes of KIBS, specializing in design, professional firms and information technology.

In 1987 the Swedish National Board for Technical Development (STU, later becoming the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, NUTEK) initiated a study of Sweden's Technological Systems and Future Development Potential. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary study was envisioned, yielding not only useful insight but also a permanent competence base for future analyses of technological systems and technology policy in Sweden. Three leading Swedish research institutes were invited to participate: the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research in Stockholm, the Department ofIndustrial Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund. I was invited to direct the project. The project group decided to focus initially on a particular technological system, namely factory automation, to be followed by similar studies of other systems. Numerous publications have resulted from the project thus far. The current volume represents a summary of our work on factory automation. It consists of several original essays and of some previously published papers which have been edited, in some cases substantially, in order to form a comprehensive and coherent picture of a technological system. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth analysis of a technological system designed as a component of a systematic study of technological systems more generally. At the time of this writing, three further studies on electronics and computers, pharmaceuticals, and powder technology are under way, to be published in a later volume.

Financial measures have traditionally been the cornerstone of the perform ance measurement system. In recent years, there has been a shift from treating financial figures as the foundation for performance measurement to treating them as one among a broader set of potential financial measures. Changes in cost structures and the manufacturing and competi tive environment have been responsible for the change of emphasis. In today's worldwide competitive environment companies are compet ing in terms of product quality, delivery, reliability, after-sales service and customer satisfaction. None of these variables are measured by traditional financial measures, despite the fact that they represent the major goals of world-class manufacturing companies. By focusing mainly on financial variables there is a danger that the performance reporting system will motivate managers to focus exclusively on cost reduction and short-term profitability and ignore many of the critical factors that determine long-term business success. The key to success, in today's global economy, is total customer satisfaction. To achieve this, companies must develop performance measures that drive employees to control processes that satisfy customer expectations. In particular, performance measures should provide process-level information that motivates employees to achieve the responsiveness and flexibility that companies require to compete on a global basis. Responsiveness is achieved by building relationships that lead to satisfied customers, suppliers and employees. Flexibility is achieved by reducing output variation in proceSfes; for example, the reduction of lead times and delays are both necessary for sustained competitive excellence and long-term profitability."

The great, complex and rapid change happening in fonner Soviet Union is overfloading an impressive impact on the western world, especially Europe, and, in the close future, on the global world. Most of this change is generating positive effects and even more optimistic expectations, but surely the difficulties to support and to render these results real and longlasting cannot be underestimated . In fact, difficulties in the adaptation, especially of the most important Countries capabilities, like R&D process and Innovation development and transfer, are being evidenced in the transitional period to completely new socio-economic and political conditions. For the above reasons various Conferences and Meetings have been organised on international base, most of them taking care of identifying and developing recommendations for improving organisation of Science in East Europe and reshaping the research in Science and Technology in the context of new socio-economic conditions. These efforts were mainly confined to scientific research that was considered one of the most important wealth's of Soviet Union, giving not specific attention to the strategic importance of Science and, even more, Innovation for industrial and socio-economic growth in the new N.I.S. Countries. Furthennore, the impressive speed of change in Innovation on the global market coupled to the enonnous change realised by N.I.S. Countries, especially by the leader Russia, is accelerating the need of an operating solution capable of linking these Countries with the Western World, rules and market, starting from Europe.

This monograph presents results originating from a research project investigating autonomous adaptation of vehicle schedules and systematically develops and evaluates innovative ideas for the management of transportation processes in volatile scenarios. Showing the progress made in the development of the methodological toolbox for decision support in dynamic process management is the major motivation behind this book. The result is a new integrated approach to dynamic decision making. Existing process planning approaches for volatile environments and their application boundaries are investigated in Part I. Part II introduces the concept of feedback-controlled adaptive decision models and proposes the required extensions of the online decision making framework and of multi-agent systems. A comprehensive evaluation of the proposed decision model adaptation framework based on computational simulation experiments is reported in Part III and demonstrates the predominance of the new approach. Distinguishing features of this book are: -It provides the first contribution to the operational management of processes in supply networks that explicitly addresses the two challenges of dynamics and distributed decision making simultaneously. -It systematically approaches the limits of model-based process planning but also proposes methods to extend the application boundaries. -Software prototypes are developed and a comprehensive evaluation within numerical simulation experiments is executed. -The observed results are discussed with an explicit focus on specific performance indicators (flexibility, stability and robustness). -The strict interdisciplinary approach merging the requirements and needs of management sciences, operations research and computer sciences is pursued throughout the book.

Global competition and growing costumer expectations force indus trial enterprises to reorganize their business processes and to support cost-effective customer services. Realizing the potential savings to be gained by exacting customer-delivery processes, logistics is currently sub ject to incisive changes. This upheaval aims at making competitive ad vantage from logistic services instead of viewing them simply as business necessity. With respect to this focus logistics management comprises the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods and services, and related information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming customer requirements I . This definition implies a holistic view on the logistic network, where the actors are suppliers, manufacturers, stock keepers, shipping agents, distributors, retailers and finally consumers. The flow of goods along the supply chain considers raw-materials, work-in-process parts, intermedi ate and finished products, and possibly waste. The prevailing manage ment of logistics operation is driven by aggregated forecasting of these material flows. Modern logistics management propagates a disaggregated view of the material flow in order to meet the precise requirements at the interface between actors in the supply chain. Replacing aggregated information by detailed values establishes the prerequisites for an integrated process planning which goes for the shift from anticipatory towards response based logistic81. Smaller units of goods are considered at shorter periods for planning, implementing and controlling the material flow. From Icf. the Council of Logistics Management (1995)."

The factory scheduling problem, that of allocating machines to competing jobs in manufacturing facilities to optimize or at least improve system performance, is encountered in many different manufacturing environments. Given the competitive pressures faced by many companies in today's rapidly changing global markets, improved factory scheduling should contribute to a flrm's success. However, even though an extensive body of research on scheduling models has been in existence for at least the last three decades, most of the techniques currently in use in industry are relatively simplistic, and have not made use of this body of knowledge. In this book we describe a systematic, long-term research effort aimed at developing effective scheduling algorithms for complex manufacturing facilities. We focus on a speciflc industrial context, that of semiconductor manufacturing, and try to combine knowledge of the physical production system with the methods and results of scheduling research to develop effective approximate solution procedures for these problems. The class of methods we suggest, decomposition methods, constitute a broad family of heuristic approaches to large, NP-hard scheduling problems which can be applied in other environments in addition to those studied in this book.

A. Dogramaci and N.R. Adam Productivity of a firm is influenced both by economic forces which act at the macro level and impose themselves on the individual firm as well as internal factors that result from decisions and processes which take place within the boundaries of the firm. Efforts towards increasing the produc tivity level of firms need to be based on a sound understanding of how the above processes take place. Our objective in this volume is to present some of the recent research work in this field. The volume consists of three parts. In part I, two macro issues are addressed (taxation and inflation) and their relation to produc tivity is analyzed. The second part of the volume focuses on methods for productivity analysis within the firm. Finally, the third part of the book deals with two additional productivity analysis techniques and their applications to public utilities. The objective of the volume is not to present a unified point of view, but rather to cover a sample of different methodologies and perspectives through original, scholarly papers."