JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Sustainability and industrial ecology require closing the loop of material and product flows. Grave concerns about local and regional impacts on air, ground and water pollution and increased risk to health and safety of community residents from
industrial activities have led to significant increase in interest in research at the intersection of management and operations in a sustainable environment. Environmental and legislative pressures play a major role in requiring manufacturers to take back their products at the end of products’ life cycles. At the same time, manufacturers also want to present themselves as green corporate citizens. Companies have felt both internal and external pressures that are economic and political. While external pressure includes issues such as legislation, corporate citizenship and green customers, internal pressures include increasing revenues and utilizing limited resources in an optimal fashion.

In early environmental management frameworks, operations managers were only involved at arms length,with different organizational units having sole responsibility for ensuring environmental excellence in process design, new product development and operational execution. Things have clearly changed now; the 1980s experienced a revolution in quality management, and the 1990s experienced the new world of electronic commerce. It has become clear now that best practice calls for integrating environmental management with on-going supply chain management efforts in a sustainable environment. The research challenges are significant and have captured the interest of operations management scholars and practitioners around the globe.

Given the significance of this problem, this special issue of Journal of Operations Management seeks to publish papers that address the cutting-edge of this critical link between operations and management in a sustainable environment.

The special issue will seek to answer a variety of issues, including:

1. Value recovery from product returns
   
   
2. Value of information
   
   
3. Key value drivers for integration of environmental management and supply chain management
   
   
4. Proactive approach towards designing products
   
   
5. Marketing

Manuscripts are to be submitted by April 15, 2005. Contact either Professor Vaidy Jayaraman ([email protected]) or Professor Jonathan Linton ([email protected]) for additional information or to submit papers electronically.

MULTIPLE CRITERIA DECISION-MAKING FOR ENGINEERS

Rapid technological and economic growth over the last 50 years has changed human lives and made modern society face
complex decision-making problems. Today, people have to deal with urbanization and industrialization, increase of water and
energy demands, environmental pollution, shortage of natural resources and food, and many other challenges. These problems necessitate the development of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing diverse mechanisms and consequences of modern civilization. Multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM), as a subfield of systems engineering and science, has become a modeling and methodological tool for dealing with complex engineering problems. The development of MCDM models and methods has been motivated not only by a variety of real-life problems requiring the consideration of multiple criteria, but also by the scientists’ and engineers’ desire to propose enhanced decision-making techniques using recent advancements in mathematical optimization, scientific computing and computer technology.

A special issue of Omega will bring together scientists and engineers working in the area of MCDM and will address the impact that the MCDM paradigm makes on science and engineering. The editors of the special issue welcome articles presenting real-life applications and case studies that will report on new methods developed for and within engineering disciplines including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, environmental engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, industrial engineering, bioengineering and others. The editors encourage submissions not only by engineers applying MCDM within their disciplines but also by researchers from other academic areas who are eager to demonstrate potential of MCDM for use in engineering. Although the proposed techniques may use advanced mathematical models or procedures, the papers will target readers without rigorous background in engineering mathematics and will emphasize the applicability and relevance of those methods rather than their derivation and origination.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Applications of MCDM in the areas of energy and environment, transportation, production and materials, communication and sustainability
  
  
• Web-based applications
  
  
• Managing performance and affordability
  
  
• Managing risk and uncertainty
  
  
• MCDM with multiple scenarios
  
  
• MCDM with black-box functions
  
  
• Modeling preferences
  
  
• Imperfect knowledge: sensitivity and robustness analysis
  
  
• Complexity issues

Manuscripts should be electronically submitted directly to the guest editors (acknowledgment will be sent upon receipt): Margaret M. Wiecek, wmalgor @clemson.edu; Matthias Ehrgott, [email protected]; Georges Fadel, [email protected]; or José Figueira, [email protected].

Submit one copy in PDF format with author names, affiliation and contact information. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Refereeing and the selection of papers for publication will be carried out according to the standards of Omega. Authors should consult the instructions for authors section at http://www.omegajournal.org/authors.html.

The submission deadline is Jan. 31, 2005. The special issue is scheduled for publication in early 2006.

ALGORITHMIC OPERATIONS RESEARCH

The new journal, Algorithmic Operations Research, is dedicated to bringing out original research papers dealing with algorithmic aspects of optimization problems. Authors are invited to submit research papers for possible publication in the journal. All submissions must be made electronically using the Web site at www.facets.ca/AOR.htm or the mirror site at http://punnen.unbsj.ca/AOR/AOR.htm, where more information on the journal can be obtained.

Algorithmic Operations Research publishes original research papers in the area of operations research and mathematical optimization with an algorithmic focus. The topics of interest include linear programming, integer programming, non-linear programming, combinatorial optimization, semidefinite programming, graph algorithms, approximation algorithms, metaheuristics, online algorithms, randomized algorithms, optimization algorithms in computational molecular biology, medicine, and all other application areas. The journal welcomes submissions involving development of algorithms, implementation and testing, theoretical analysis of algorithms, computational complexity, experimental analysis, and application and modeling papers with substantial algorithmic content. Survey papers, short communications, invited software reviews and invited book reviews are also of interest to the journal.

The first issue of the journal is scheduled to appear in January 2006. We are committed to maintain an average processing time for the initial editorial decision of no more than four months, and every effort will be made to complete the initial processing within six months.

CP-AI-OR’05

The International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CP-AI-OR) is devoted to the integration of constraint programming, artificial intelligence and operations research techniques. The second CP-AI-OR conference will be held in Prague, Czech Republic,May 3—June 1, 2005.

The aim of the conference is to bring together interested researchers from AI and OR, and to give them the opportunity to show how the integration of techniques from AI and OR can lead to interesting results on large-scale and complex problems. The conference explicitly welcomes new ideas and methods for integrating OR and AI techniques that have arisen from real-world applications.

The program committee invites submissions that include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Integration of constraint relaxation methods, e.g. constraint propagation, cutting planes, reduced costs, global constraints, graph algorithms, dynamic programming, Lagrangean and convex relaxations, heuristic functions based on constraint relaxation.
  
  
• Integration of search and solving methods, e.g. branch and bound, intelligent backtracking, incomplete search, randomized search, column generation and other decomposition methods, local search, metaheuristics.
  
  
• Forms of integration, e.g. atatic/dynamic problem decomposition, linking variables and constraints in different solvers, transformations between models and solvers, methods using information derived by other solving methods, the collaboration between concurrent methods, models and solvers.
  
  
• Problems, modeling, and applications.

The deadline for abstracts is Jan. 10, 2005; for paper submissions, Jan. 16, 2005. Final papers are due March 7, 2005. Authors are requested to prepare their papers according to the Springer instructions (www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). All papers are to be submitted electronically in a PDF or PS format by following the instructions at http://cpaior05.mff.cuni.cz/.

OR SOCIETY OF ISRAEL

The annual meeting of the OR Society of Israel (ORSIS 2005) will take place in Caesarea, Israel, on May 29-30. The venue is the Dan-Caesarea hotel, and the organizer is Dr. Iddo Eliazar of Bar-Ilan University. The conference will focus, not exclusively, however, on finance-OR. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected].