LOGISTICS OF PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY
Edited by D.P. S.C. Graves, A.H.G. Rinnooy Kan and P.H. Zipkin
PREFACE
Since their beginnings earlier in this century, Operations Research and Management Science have been deeply concerned with the managerial problems raised by production, inventory and distribution -all the activities comprised by the general term logistics. OR/MS have contributed greatly, both to our intellectual understanding of the nature of logistics systems and to the resolution of diverse practical problems in the field.
Given this fruitful history, one might suspect that all the major issues and problems in the area would have been resolved by now. This is simply not so. One clear message that emerges from the essays in this book is that logistics remains an active, vibrant subject of inquiry.
There are several reasons for this continued development. First, many logistics systems are extremely complex. It is difficult, both for researchers and managers, to achieve a clear, coherent picture of how such systems work. It has sometimes taken decades to obtain satisfactory solutions to the technical problems inherent in these systems, and even now many such problems remain open. Moreover, we continue to witness the development of fundamentally new approaches to the subject and a lively debate over basic terms, premises and issues.
Second, the practical world of logistics has changed markedly over the past few decades. The physical technologies of production and transportation have evolved considerably - think of flexible manufacturing and overnight air delivery. Even more striking has been the explosion of information technologies, which has utterly transformed the very nature of logistics management. Over that same period, furthermore, the questions that concern managers most deeply have shifted. The intricate problems of day-to-day control, while still important, have yielded center stage to broader issues of performance evaluation and systems design. Taking just one more example, the dimension of quality has become a central focus in virtually all logistics organizations. All these changes have posed, and doubtless will continue to pose, significant new challenges to researchers.
This book presents a broad survey of the state of the art in logistics systems research as viewed by a distinguished group of scholars. The essays collected here, all written specifically for this volume, focus mainly on the key developments of the last decade.
And what a decade it has been! We have witnessed a truly astonishing leap in our understanding of what logistics is all about. In topic after topic, as the following chapters testify, old problems have been tackled with fresh approaches, and entirely new subfields have been born.
Here is an overview of what is to come: the book is divided into four parts, each composed of several chapters. Rather than fully summarize each chapter here (the authors have done that admirably themselves!), we shall provide a broad look at the several parts and their connections.
Part I. Fundamentals. Part 1 consists of Chapter 1, Single-Product, Single Location Models, by Hau Lee and Steven Nahmias. These basic models truly are fundamental to all that follows; they form the building blocks from which more elaborate models are constructed. Furthermore, such models are widely applied themselves. And, as Lee and Nahmias point out, even these simple formulations have yielded exciting new insights in recent years.
Part II Multiple Products and Locations. This part includes five chapters, each of which examines complex logistics systems from a different perspective. In Chapter 2 John Muckstadt and Robin Roundy summarize the extraordinary advances that have been achieved (in which they have played central roles) in optimizing the crucial coordination decisions required to manage complex production and distribution systems. Whereas in this approach the world is viewed as deterministic, the next two chapters explicitly focus on stochastic demands. A key issue in this case is how information is collected and used. Awi Federgruen, in Chapter 3, treats the case where all information is centralized, while in Chapter 4 Sven Axsäter examines systems operating in a decentralized mode. Substantial progress has been made in our understanding of both types of systems.
Chapter 5, by Rajan Suri, Jerry Sanders and Manjunath Kamath focuses on the congestion effects resulting from the interaction between randomness and limited processing capacity. Specifically, they consider networks of queues as models of manufacturing systems. Interestingly, such networks were originally formulated to model production systems, but applications languished until fairly recently. Now, the field has become very active, as this chapter documents. Uday Karmarkar, in Chapter 6, combines this style of modeling with basic inventory-control issues, such as lotsizing and order-release planning. This combined approach is quite novel, and it yields a number of new insights.
Part III. Production Planning and Scheduling. This part of the book offers several perspectives on practical modeling methods for implementing production plans over the short and medium term. Here, for the most part, we return to the deterministic picture of Chapter 2 above, but a host of additional factors must now be accounted for, including workforce planning, multiple production resources, and the like. This subject is extraordinarily broad and diverse, and Joseph Thomas and John McClain provide an indispensable overview in Chapter 7. Then, in Chapter 8, Jeremy Shapiro reviews the use of mathematical programming methods in logistics. While such applications are quite venerable, going back to the roots of linear programming, recent developments in solution methods and model-management software have given fresh impetus to the subject.
Chapter 9, by Eugene Lawler, Jan Karel Lenstra, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, and David Shmoys, is a thorough survey of the extensive literature on production sequencing and scheduling. The focus here is on computational complexity; this approach teaches us when such problems can be solved fairly easily and when they are fundamentally difficult. Finally, in Chapter 10, Gabriel Bitran and Devanath Tirupati introduce the concept of hierarchical planning. More than a model per se, this is an approach to constructing a suite of models at different levels of detail to enable managers to cope with truly complex systems.
Part IV. Additional Topics. This last part might well be entitled 'new directions', for indeed each of its chapters covers a topic of intense and largely recent interest. Chapter 11, by Kenneth Baker, is concerned with material requirements planning (MRP) and related methods, which have become the standard control mechanism for discrete-parts manufacturing. This approach has spawned a substantial body of research. The next two chapters treat even newer subjects, both largely inspired by the example of Japanese approaches to logistics management. Harry Groenevelt discusses the Just-in-Time production system, focusing on research efforts to understand it, in Chapter 12. In Chapter 13 Peter Kolesar offers a provocative look at the issue of quality management and a rather sharp critique of research in the area.
New developments in manufacturing technology, and research efforts to come to grips with them, are the subject of Charles Fine's concluding Chapter 14.
S.C. Graves
A.H.G. Rinnooy Kan
P.H. Zipkin
Complete chapters on ScienceDirect
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