In 2012 IJPR published its 50th volume

In March 2012, I was appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR). I realised that this was the year when we published the 50th volume of IJPR. To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to prepare a special issue with invited papers by leading specialists in our domain. Taking into account the exceptional role and importance of their scientific contributions for worldwide production research, several scientific personalities were invited to submit a paper to this issue. The invitations were sent at the end of July 2012 and now, after one year of preparation, this outstanding double issue of our journal is ready for our readers. Under time constraints and with exceptional positive replies, we quickly reached our quota and I realised that there were so many people I would have liked to invite to participate but could not.

IJPR was created in 1961 and was a pioneer multidisciplinary journal publishing results of scientific research on manufacturing technologies, product/process design, production engineering, operations management and logistics. The scientific domain ‘Production Research’ was born with our journal.

The founding Editor-in-Chief, Norman Dudley wrote (Dudley 1961):

Production is a meeting place of many disciplines, for the planning, organising and control of manufacturing industry necessitate an understanding of the nature and interaction of the technical, human and economic forces which are the agents of production. If this understanding can be advanced by bringing together papers which would otherwise have been scattered throughout the literature of the several contributing sciences, the initiative of The Institution of Production Engineers in launching this International Research Journal will have been well justified.

Nigel Corlett was appointed as the first assistant editor of IJPR and helped Norman Dudley to create the journal. Then he was the assistant editor of IJPR for all of Norman Dudley’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief. It is a great pleasure for me to publish in this issue a short note by Nigel Corlett (thanks to John A. Buzacott for putting me in contact with Nigel).

The former Editors-in-Chief of IJPR, Norman Dudley (1961–1981), Roy Sury (1982–1997), and John E. Middle (1998–2011), accomplished a great deal to put the journal at the summit of our domain. As I wrote in my first Editorial (Dolgui 2012):

Many cutting edge scientific results were published in IJPR and rest in the annals of scientific research. Significant advances published here were transferred from academia to industry and then to the rest of society. The journal is a giant in our field. In the mind of many of my colleagues it is the reference for all of us. To summarise, IJPR has been the flagship of our profession for half a century.

So, this issue is composed of one historical note and 48 papers by leading researchers in production research. This summarises the main results, gives an historical picture, and shows the current state of the art and perspectives in our domain. I hope you will enjoy, be informed and even directed to new areas of research after reading this issue.

And now to the content of this issue, here the readers will find:

• papers analysing the progress of production research since 1961,

• state-of-the-art papers for particular fields written by leading specialists,

• articles that present research activities over the years from well-known laboratories,

• thought pieces, such as critiques of the role of IJPR in the past, present and in the future, and the role of IJPR articles with some examples of major results published in IJPR,

• and, of course, papers with recent and novel major scientific results.

Below is a breakdown of the papers that feature in this special issue.

Two papers:

• ‘The Origins of Research and Patterns of Authorship in the International Journal of Production Research’ by Timothy D. Fry, Joan M. Donohue (University of South Carolina, USA), Brooke A. Saladin (Wake Forest University, USA) and Guangzhi Shang (University of South Carolina, USA),

• ‘Outlets for Operations Management Research: A DEA Assessment of Journal Quality and Rankings’ by Timothy D. Fry and Joan M. Donohue (University of South Carolina, USA)

were moved to this issue to provide some interesting additional information on the authorship in IJPR and to state the current position of our journal in different journal rankings. Both these papers provide intriguing American viewpoints. (Note that the second paper deals with Operations Management which is only a part of the IJPR scope.)

The heart of this issue is composed of papers by colleagues who have provided us with exceptional views of the past, the present and the future of our domain and journal.

In his paper ‘Fifty Years of Shifting Paradigms’, Christopher O’Brien (Nottingham University Business School, UK) shows how business paradigms evolved during the last 50 years and analyses the current tendencies in relations with history and perspectives of IJPR, and the role of the International Foundation for Production Research.

The paper ‘Searching for the Grey Swans: The Next 50 Years of Production Research’ by Henk A. Akkermans (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) and Luk N. Van Wassenhove (INSEAD, France) analyses the success of IJPR by considering the continual editorial goal of the journal to publish ‘interdisciplinary work that is both relevant and rigorous’.

Nevertheless, the world has become more and more complex and changeable. The question these authors pose is: how do we maintain the interdisciplinarity, practical relevance and scientific rigour for the analysis of this complex and dynamic business world? This is the ultimate challenge for the journal.

An excellent analysis of production research results is presented in the paper ‘Then and Now – 50 Years of Production Research’ by John A. Buzacott (Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada). The author presents three industrial problems addressed 50 years ago and then shows how these problems can be solved more efficiently in the present, taking into account the progress of computing technologies and production research. However, John points out that nowadays ‘outsourcing and alternative ways of coordinating supply chains’ as well as ‘financial incentives’ should also be considered, since they ‘did not arise’ 50 years ago. Finally, he concludes with a comment on the relevance of production research: ‘if researchers have not understood the real world adequately, these systems and software will not be effective in improving production’.

One of the areas requiring further and extensive research, because existing models seem to not be sufficiently relevant, is the global or offshore outsourcing. This is analysed in my joint paper with Jean-Marie Proth (INRIA, France): ‘Outsourcing: Definitions and Analysis’. The main question that is asked: are we sure that, when considering all parameters of the problem, it is still advantageous to outsource?

An exhaustive review of ‘Contributions to the Design and Analysis of Cellular Manufacturing Systems’ by Ronald G. Askin (Arizona State University, USA) presents the state of the art and major contributions of IJPR to analyse and optimise cellular manufacturing systems. This topic is still relevant for our journal because of the ever increasing use of new types of these systems worldwide.

The three next papers deal with different aspects of flexibility in manufacturing systems. The studies on flexibility, agility, re-configurability, etc., are welcome subjects for IJPR.

In the paper ‘Flexibility and Complexity: Is It a Trade-Off?’ by George Chryssolouris, Konstantinos Efthymiou, Nikolaos Papakostas, Dimitris Mourtzis and Aris Pagoropoulos (University of Patras, Greece), different flexibility and complexity measures are presented and a relationship between flexibility and complexity is investigated.

Miryam Barad (Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel), in the article ‘Flexibility Development – A Personal Retrospective’, analyses the ideas of flexibility via her own research experience and contributions in studying these complex concepts used to reduce ‘risks in uncertain and changeable environments’.

Yoram Koren (University of Michigan, Ann Arbour, USA) introduced in the mid-1990s the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) and developed it further in his publications and examples of real-life applications. In his paper ‘The Rapid Responsiveness of RMS’, the main elements and principal advantages of such systems are presented and summarised.

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems is one of the topics that interest a lot of IJPR’s readers.

In the article ‘Supply Chains: What They Are and the New Problems They Raise’, Albert Corominas (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) considers the history and state of the art of supply chain research when responding to the following question: ‘Whether the term is useful only to, say, put old wine into new wineskins or responds to a very different reality from that we had a few decades ago?’

IJPR publishes intensively on supply chains and is considered by our colleagues as one of the leading journals in this field.

In the paper ‘Evolution of Operations Planning and Control: From Production to Supply Chains’ by Jan Olhager (Lund University, Sweden), the major planning and control concepts and techniques as well as their evolution over the past 50 years are analysed: shop-floor control, material requirements planning (MRP), sales and operations, and supply chain planning.

The next paper ‘Planned Spontaneity for Better Product Availability’ by Sridhar R. Tayur (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) presents the author’s thoughts about the development of models for inventory management and their application in industry. A profound analysis is given with many practical examples, technical and philosophical observations.

Inventory control was and is still one of the pillars of IJPR publishing.

Pallav Chhaochhria (Sun Trading LLC, USA) and Stephen C. Graves (MIT, USA) in their article ‘A Forecast-driven Tactical Planning Model for a Serial Manufacturing System’ propose a new and interesting model for production planning of a serial production system under demand, lead times and yield uncertainties by minimising operating costs subject to service level constraints. The best operating tactics are deduced from this model and several managerial insights on the application of these tactics are given.

In the article ‘A Multi-level Inventory System with a Make-to-order Supplier’ by Horst Tempelmeier (University of Cologne, Germany), a factory with warehouse and distribution centres is studied. The lead times are considered as random with known distributions of probabilities. A decomposition approach is applied and an optimisation model is suggested. The decision variables are the processing time in the factory and the parameters of the inventory policies applied in the warehouse and the distribution centres.

‘Storage Policies and Optimal Shape of a Storage System’ by Nima Zaerpour, René B. M. de Koster (Erasmus University, The Netherlands) and Yugang Yu (University of Science and Technology of China) demonstrates ‘that the optimal shape of a storage system with a given capacity is independent of the storage policy being used’. This is a crucial result in the domain of warehousing, because we do not need to analyze the warehouse shape for some sophisticated class-based storage policy. The shape that minimizes the response time for the random policy is optimal for all other class-based policies.

The next article ‘Procurement Allocation Planning with Multiple Suppliers under Competition’, by Mike Prince, Joseph Geunes, and J. Cole Smith (University of Florida, USA), deals with the problem of where a firm can obtain a certain quantity of a product from a set of capacitated suppliers. The products of different suppliers are interchangeable. A procurement game is used and an integer programme is developed to minimise the total cost to obtain a given quantity of product.

The following four papers deal with different aspects of advertising and dynamic pricing. This new and promising domain is underrepresented in our journal and needs to be explored further.

In ‘Ingredient Branding Strategies in an Assembly Supply Chain: Models and Analysis’ by Juan Zhang, Qinglong Gou, Liang Liang (University of Science & Technology of China) and Xiuli He (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA), a differential game is employed to analyse common advertising policies in a supply chain composed of an equipment manufacturer and its supplier. The equilibrium of advertising efforts for the supplier and equipment manufacturer is proven. Then this model is extended to the case of two suppliers.

Xuan Qiu and George Q. Huang from The University of Hong Kong study a supply hub with storage space and logistics services proposed to firms in an industrial park in their paper ‘Storage Pricing, Replenishment, and Delivery Schedules in a Supply Hub in Industrial Park: A Bilevel Programming Approach’. If the prices and logistic conditions of the hub are not satisfactory, the firms do not use this hub but search for external warehouses. This paper suggests efficient models to optimise storage pricing, replenishment and delivery for this supply hub maximising its profit.

The paper ‘Pricing and Production Planning for Reverse Supply Chain: A Review’ by Daniel W. Steeneck and Subhash C. Sarin (Virginia Tech, USA) presents an overview of the literature on reverse supply chains, especially on pricing of remanufactured products and production planning for remanufacturing systems.

Remanufacturing systems and reverse supply chains are the hope for a more ecologically sustainable future, and should be a mainstay at our journal in the years to come.

Another paper on pricing issues ‘How Does Pricing Power Affect a Firm’s Sourcing Decisions from Unreliable Suppliers?’ by Tao Li (Santa Clara University, USA), Suresh P. Sethi and Jun Zhang (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA) study a supply chain with unreliable suppliers and show that optimal sourcing decisions depend on the ‘ability to adjust the market price’.

The following papers deal with the issues of lot-sizing and scheduling. These topics are dealt with daily by managers, but have never been completely solved and represent another pillar of our journal.

Tadeusz Sawik (AGH University of Science & Technology, Poland) in his paper ‘Integrated Selection of Suppliers and Scheduling of Customer Orders in the Presence of Supply Chain Disruption Risks’ suggests new models for selecting suppliers, order quantity allocation and customer order scheduling where there are supply chain disruptions. Average and worst-case performances of a supply chain are optimised.

‘A Review of Lot Streaming’ by M. Cheng, N. J. Mukherjee and S. C. Sarin (Virginia Tech, USA) presents the state of the art on lot-streaming, i.e. techniques to split lots into sub-lots and parallel scheduling sub-lots to minimise both time-based and cost-based objective functions.

Jonathan F. Bard and Zhufeng Gao (University of Texas at Austin, USA), and Rodolfo Chacon, and John Stuber (Texas Instruments, USA) study an assignment and scheduling problem for product lots in the semiconductor industry in their paper ‘Daily Scheduling of Multi-Pass Lots at Assembly and Test Facilities’. Lots pass several times through the production system, i.e. a re-entrant flow is considered. The objective is to determine machine setups, lot assignment and sequencing minimising shortages, maximising throughput and machine utilisation, and minimising makespan.

In the paper ‘Operations Scheduling with Multiple Resources and Transportation Considerations’ by Kangbok Lee and Lei Lei (Rutgers Business School, USA), Michael Pinedo (Stern School of Business, New York University, USA) and Shengbin Wang (Rutgers Business School, USA), a specific scheduling problem that is often encountered in emergency logistics is considered. Renewable (for example medical teams) and non-renewable resources (for example medical supplies) have to be transported to the affected areas. Thus, scheduling of operations is a crucial issue.

‘Identical Parallel Machine Scheduling to Minimise Makespan and Total Weighted Completion Time: A Column Generation Approach’ by Jingyang Xu and Rakesh Nagi (University at Buffalo, USA) considers a very complex scheduling problem with identical parallel machines and the minimisation of the sum of weighted completion time and makespan. A new efficient approach is developed based on column generation techniques.

Lester Carballo and Nodari Vakhania (Facultad de Ciencias, Mexico) and Frank Werner (Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany) suggest a new method to solve a job-shop scheduling problem with groups of parallel machines in the paper ‘Reducing Efficiently the Search Tree for Multiprocessor Job-shop Scheduling Problems’.

An interesting scheduling model for the refurbishing process in recycling management is considered in the paper ‘A Scheduling Model for the Refurbishing Process in Recycling Management’ by T. C. E. Cheng (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), B. M. T. Lin and Y. Tian (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan). The system is modelled as a two-stage flow-shop. Products are dismantled at the first stage. The parts obtained after dismantling are refurbished on dedicated machines at the second stage.

Dirk Briskorn and Erwin Pesch (University of Siegen, Germany) study a scheduling problem with inventory constraints for trucks in intermodal container transshipment terminals in the article ‘Variable Very Large Neighbourhood Algorithms for Truck Sequencing at Transshipment Terminals’.

The research on multi-modal transport and logistics is essential for our journal and submissions on these topics are welcome.

The next paper ‘A Branch-and-Cut Algorithm for the Multi-Product Multi-Vehicle Inventory-Routing Problem’, by Leandro C. Coelho and Gilbert Laporte (CIRRELT and HEC Montréal, Canada), deals with multi-product and multi-vehicle inventory and the routing problem for production systems with vendor-managed inventories. A branch-and-cut algorithm is presented to solve to optimality this hard combinatorial optimisation problem.

‘Optimising Production and Distribution Operations in Large Water Supply Networks: A Piecewise Linear Optimisation Approach’ by Derek Verleye and El-Houssaine Aghezzaf (Ghent University, Belgium) deals with optimal planning of water production and distribution for a drinking water network in Belgium. A mixed-integer nonlinear programme is proposed for optimisation. Heuristics and some concluding remarks on the computational complexity of this problem are also reported.

In the next paper, a very central aspect dealing with the integration of process planning and scheduling is treated. Incorporating different disciplines (mechanical engineering and operations management, for instance) is a promising path for production systems improvement.

P. Mohapatra (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India), Lyes Benyoucef (Aix-Marseille University, France) and M. K. Tiwari (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India) study the design of reconfigurable manufacturing systems with different machines in the paper ‘Integration of Process Planning and Scheduling through Adaptive Setup Planning: A Multi-Objective Approach’. The authors search for the optimal process plans and task scheduling for new products. This includes the selection of tool directions, machines and the positioning surfaces, etc., while considering precedence constraints between tasks.

The next three papers deal with performance evaluation and dimensioning of production systems with machine breakdowns. Although well known, this difficult topic still requires further research for production management.

In the paper ‘Production Systems Engineering: Main Results and Recommendations for Management’ by Jingshan Li (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Semyon M. Meerkov (University of Michigan, Ann Arbour, USA) and Liang Zhang (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA), a general framework of the so-called Production Systems Engineering discipline is explained, particularly useful for industrial managers who wish to use it for analysis, design and continuous improvement of their production systems.

Then, in the paper ‘Continuous Improvement at Toyota Manufacturing Plant: Applications of Production Systems Engineering Methods’ by Jingshan Li (University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA), two applications of the framework explained in the previous paper are presented. For these examples, bottlenecks are identified and production line performances are improved.

The article ‘Perturbation Analysis and Optimisation of Continuous Flow Transfer Lines with Delay’ by Xiaolan Xie (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; and École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Saint-Étienne, France), Sophie Hennequin (École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Metz, France) and Iyad Mourani (Al-Baath University, Syria) presents an approach for the optimisation of failure-prone transfer lines via perturbation analysis and simulation. Delays for material transfer are also taken into account.

The following paper deals with a new concept of service-oriented production systems. In the near future, this topic will be spotlighted because of intense interest from some industrial sectors.

Kangzhou Wang, Zhibin Jiang, Na Li and Na Geng (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) in their paper ‘Optimal Production and Admission Control for a Stochastic SOM System with Demands for Product and PSS’ consider a service-oriented manufacturing system. Optimal dynamic admission control of the product orders and optimal dynamic production control of products are studied at the same time.

The article ‘Collaborative Production Line Control: Minimisation of Throughput Variability and WIP’ by Rodrigo Reyes Levalle (Purdue University, USA), Manuel Scavarda (Kimberly Clark Corporation, Panama) and Shimon Y. Nof (Purdue University, USA) shows that industries can benefit from collaborative production advancements. For example, advantages can be obtained via responsive collaboration among machines. Innovative and stimulating models to dynamically select a set of collaboration rules to optimise system performance are reviewed.

In the article ‘An Enterprise-Aided Theory and Logic for Real-Time Management’ by Masayuki Matsui (Kanagawa University, Japan), the author shows that traditional control cannot be efficiently applied in the modern changeable market with the necessity of real-time control in a big-data environment. Thus, he proposes a so-called ‘sandwich theory’ and develops real-time control techniques combined with a look-ahead logic for the enterprise-organisational behaviour management under big data.

Kazuyoshi Ishii (Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan) in his article ‘A Production Research to Create New Value of Business Output’ provides us with an extensive deep-thinking reflection on the future of production research for a new society where worldwide wealth is based on physical, economic and psychological values with minimal environmental impact. Scientific management, fusion models, value models, innovation of management, product/service and production system development are all included.

The paper ‘An Analysis of Order Fulfilment Approaches for Delivering Variety and Customisation’ by Bart L. MacCarthy (Nottingham University Business School, UK) addresses a challenging issue on how to provide high levels of variety and customisation; a difficult endeavour for many producers. Mass Customisation and Open Pipeline systems approaches are analysed in this paper, focusing on the clothing and automotive sectors. As the Editor-in-Chief of IJPR, I encourage more research in this promising direction.

The use of semantic technologies and ontologies is an exciting ongoing research topic. In the next paper, ‘Semantic Technologies for Engineering Asset Life Cycle Management’, Dimitris Kiritsis (EPFL, Switzerland) presents the research work completed by his team with the objective to provide more information on the use of ontology-based technologies for the lifecycle management of products and engineering assets. This is a valiant attempt to bring this subject from academia to industry.

The next article ‘Implementing Collaboration Moderator Service to Support Various Phases of Virtual Organisations’ by J. A. Harding (Loughborough University, UK) and R. Swarnkar (Accelrys Software, Inc, UK) provides an excellent background on the evolution of ‘collaboration moderators’ and explores their role in supporting virtual organisations.

The paper ‘Assembly Planning and Evaluation in an Augmented Reality Environment’ by Z. B. Wang, L. X. Ng, S. K. Ong, and A. Y. C. Nee (National University of Singapore) shows how by using augmented reality (AR) technologies, intuitive and effective techniques can be proposed for manual assembly planning. A case study illustrates the methodology and system when applied.

The paper ‘Process Comprehension for Shopfloor Manufacturing Knowledge Reuse’ by Xianzhi Zhang, Aydin Nassehi, Mehrdad Safaieh and Stephen T. Newman (University of Bath, UK) illustrates rapid product development which mostly depends on fast and dependable process planning and knowledge reuse. The process comprehension approach is employed to obtain the process knowledge at shop-floor level and to reuse it with different manufacturing resources in CNC machining environments.

The paper ‘VR-PMS: A New Approach for Performance Measurement and Management of Industrial Systems’ by F. Vernadat (DIT European Court of Auditors, Luxembourg), L. Shah, A. Etienne, and A. Siadat (Arts et Métiers, ParisTech, France) offers a new performance measurement and management framework based on value and risk analysis. This framework is applied to the modelling and evaluation of manufacturing processes performance as well as to select manufacturing process alternatives.

Agostino Villa and Giulia Bruno (Politecnico di Torino, Italy) start with a discussion on the new Italian law promoting the development of inter-firm cooperation in their paper ‘Promoting SME Cooperative Aggregations: Main Criteria and Contractual Models’. This can be interesting for a large production research community working on policies for contractual forms of coordination in SME networks. In addition, a model for the design of a SME network is suggested in this paper. It provides both an ontology-based formulation to aid in defining the contract structurally as well as a basic workflow to recognise the essential steps for the network design.

The article ‘Sustainable Manufacturing and the Role of the International Journal of Production Research’ by Youngjae Chun and Bopaya Bidanda (University of Pittsburgh, USA) presents a comprehensive overview of the spectrum of articles related to sustainable manufacturing that have been published in IJPR over the past 50 years. It is a great pleasure to read this paper and understand the significant contribution of our journal to this pertinent research area.

Finally, the paper ‘Optimising the Number of Copies and Storage Protocols for Print Preservation of Research Journals’ by Candace Arai Yano, Zuo-Jun Max Shen (University of California, Berkley, USA) and Stephen Chan (Mustang Engineering, Houston, USA) deals with unexpected topic on the optimisation of the number of copies for archiving research journals. This shows a large spectrum of possible applications of production research methods, not only in manufacturing systems, but also for services and other domains of real-life situations. I wish to encourage this broadening of what constitutes IJPR’s scope.

I would like to finish this Editorial with one additional citation from my inaugural Editorial from 2012 text (Dolgui 2012):

The reputation of IJPR is based on a strong link with industrial applications. This will continue. Convincing scientific results with clear real life applications will be the principal criteria for the selection of papers. Of course, didactic articles, presenting new and interesting production research problems or/and new applications will be also welcome. At the same time, our journal will never refuse papers that promise a major advance in models and theory, as long as their main concepts and usefulness are clearly explained so that the production research community as a whole can understand them. In addition, a special place will be reserved to surveys and discussion papers as well as invited articles presented by leading specialists in our domain. Establishing a permanent search for new topics and promising directions will be a high priority.

I hope you enjoy reading this special issue, and please continue to submit the best of your scientific results to our International Journal of Production Research.

Alexandre Dolgui
Professor, Editor-in-Chief of IJPR
Email: [email protected]