Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
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Mapping operations research in project management: a bibliometric analysis

2021 , Muñoz Villamizar, Andrés , Solano Charris, Elyn L. , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo

Successful project management can help organisations in reducing costs and increasing its efficiency. Likewise, operations research has contributed significantly to improve project management performance with phase-project-planning methodologies. However, as far as we know, there is no literature review that compiles operations research in project management (OR+PM). Thus, this paper aims to present a bibliometric analysis of OR+PM using 1,254 research papers retrieved from ISI Web of Science. This final dataset is composed of articles from scientific journals published between 2001-2018. The results indicate that project scheduling, project management and resource-constrained project scheduling have been the backbone concepts of OR+PM; while terms, such as sustainability, earned value management, multi-objective optimisation, and multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been gaining relevance in recent years. Results also show who have been the most influential authors, institutions and countries in the development of this field. Finally, future research opportunities for OR+PM are identified.

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Alineación entre métodos y necesidades de programación de la producción

2016 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Santos García, Javier , Hurtado-Hernandez, Margarita

Este artículo sugiere una alineación entre entornos de producción y metodologías de programación de la producción de acuerdo a las necesidades de programación de cada tipo de entorno de producción. El estudio considera dos tipos de entornos de planificación y, dependiendo de sus necesidades de planificación, propone los métodos que mejor se puedan ajustar para soportar la tarea de la programación de la producción

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A note on defining organisational systems for contingency theory in OM

2018 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Santos, Javier , Hurtado-Hernandez, Margarita

This paper aims to improve the applicability and relevance of contingency theory research in the field of Operations Management. Based on the results of previous studies, we have identified a systems-based single definition of organisation types that could describe the fit between organisational environment and organisational structure. This definition of organisation type, which we call an ‘organisational system’, regards the organisation as an integrated whole instead of as a sum of its parts and can help to better classify organisations in order to identify fits between organisation types and emerging practices in Operations Management. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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The impact of unequal processing time variability on reliable and unreliable merging line performance

2021 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Shaaban, Sabry , Marsillac, Erika , Laarraf, Zouhair

Research on merging lines is expanding as their use grows significantly in the contexts of remanufacturing, reverse logistics and developing economies. This article is the first to study the behavior of unpaced, reliable, and unreliable merging assembly lines that are deliberately unbalanced with respect to their coefficients of variation (CV). Conducting a series of simulation runs with varying line lengths, buffer storage capacities and unbalanced CV patterns delivers intriguing results. For both reliable and unreliable lines, the best pattern for generating higher throughput is found to be a balanced configuration (equal CVs along both parallel lines), except for unreliable lines with a station buffer capacity of six. In that case, the highest throughput results from the descending configuration, i.e. concentrating the variable stations close to the beginning of both parallel lines and the steady stations towards the end of the line. Ordering from the least to most steady station also provides the best average buffer level. By exploring the experimental Pareto Frontier, this study shows the combined performance of unbalanced CV patterns for throughput and average buffer level. Study results suggest that caution should be exercised when assuming equivalent behavior from reliable and unreliable lines, or single serial lines and merging lines, since the relative throughput performance of some CV patterns changed between the different configurations.

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The effects of supply variability on the performance of assembly systems

2022 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Hurtado-Hernandez, Margarita

Assembly processes play a big role in the current business context as global supply chains depend on many subcomponents to produce a single finished product. Previous studies have shown contrasting results regarding the effect that supply variability (the variability of feeding stations) has on the performance of assembly systems, as opposed to the variability of the station matching and assembling the components. This paper aims to close this gap by studying the behaviour of simple assembly systems with differing degrees of variability allocation among the stations through an experimental simulation study. Results suggest that a reduction in feeding station variability results in higher throughput, even in systems where the variability of one of the feeding stations increases while the other decreases. Furthermore, in scenarios with high total variance, the highest throughput is reached by transferring both variance and work from one of the feeding stations to any other station, whereas in low variance systems symmetrical work transfer to the feeding stations results in the highest throughput, as previously shown. Finally, reducing feeding station variability decreased the time spent in the assembly station (waiting time for component matching plus time for the assembly operation) only in experiments with high total variance. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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Learning from the past to shape the future: A comprehensive text mining analysis of OR/MS reviews

2021 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Leeuw, Sander de

This paper provides an overview of the evolution and state-of-the-art of the Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS) subject area from 1956 to 2019. Using text mining techniques on the content of the title, abstract, and author keywords of papers classified by the Web of Science as literature review studies in OR/MS, we found that there are 76 topical consolidated clusters in the field covering a wide range of reviewed topics. Since 2015, reviews on supply chain risk management and big data analytics have had the highest impact in the field, whereas topics such as Industry 4.0, socio-technical systems, social networks, green supply, sustainable supply chain, and resilience engineering have all received significant attention from researchers. Reviews on analytic hierarchy process were found to be the most impactful overall, showing the high relevance of multi-criteria decision making in the current research and practice contexts. Furthermore, a text mining analysis of the papers citing OR/MS literature reviews showed that optimization continues to be one of the most highly influential methodological contributions of OR/MS to other research areas and that topics such as circular economy, carbon emissions, and social commerce have yet to find some traction in OR/MS research, suggesting future research and multidisciplinary opportunities for the field. Results also show that the research area of Public Administration has been greatly influenced by OR/MS reviews as 16% of all the papers published in that field have cited at least one of the 1744 review papers included in this study. Finally, a summary table of published structured literature reviews per topic (benchmarks, classifications, taxonomies) is presented as a short bibliography of OR/MS review papers.

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Trends and topics in IJPR from 1961 to 2017: a statistical history

2018 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Marsillac, Erika

This paper studies the history of the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR) by analysing the topics that have received the most attention in each of the journal’s publication years. Text mining exposed for scrutiny the most frequently mentioned and cited terms contained in the titles, abstracts and keywords of IJPR papers. Analyses suggest that the triad of scheduling/optimisation/simulation and supply-chain-related topics have been IJPR’s mainstays, but valuable opportunities remain for relevant topics that have not yet been concurrently and frequently studied. Results also show that terms related to sustainability and risk management topics have gained recent relevance. In addition, IJPR appears to complement its modelling technique focus with empirical methodological approaches to provide a well-balanced perspective, since the ‘case study’ term is common. Finally, a linear relationship is found between the number of papers that have covered certain topics and the number of citations those topics have received, highlighting which topics had fewer or more citations than expected, given the number of papers that covered those topics. IJPR stands as one of the most prestigious and established journals in its field and the results from this study indicate the evolving interests of the field for over half a century.

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Is the scheduling task context-dependent? A survey investigating the presence of constraints in different manufacturing contexts

2016 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Hurtado-Hernandez, Margarita , Santos, Javier

Most studies regarding real scheduling constraints only consider the constraints related to the specific manufacturing environment studied, limiting the possibility of drawing general conclusions. A survey of 50 companies was conducted in order to discover which constraints were present and what their relationship was with the scheduling context. This paper investigates which practical scheduling constraints are present in the manufacturing industry and whether the scheduling task is context-dependent. Results of this study show that some practical production constraints are context-dependent. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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Studying the effects of the skewness of inter-arrival and service times on the probability distribution of waiting times

2020 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Shaaban, Sabry , Marsillac, Erika , Hurtado-Hernandez, Margarita

Previous studies have shown that the mean queue length of a GI/G/1 system is significantly influenced by the skewness of inter-arrival times, but not by the skewness of service times. These results are limited because all the distributions considered in previous studies were positively skewed. To address this limitation, this paper investigates the effects of the skewness of inter-arrival and service times on the probability distribution of waiting times, when a negatively skewed distribution is used to model inter-arrival and service times. Subsequent to a series of experiments on a GI/G/1 queue using discrete-event simulation, results have shown that the lowest mean waiting time and the lowest variance of waiting times can be attained with a combination of positive inter-arrival skewness and negative service skewness. Results also show an interesting effect of the skewness of service times in the probability of no-delay in environments with a higher utilization factor. © 2020 Brazilian Operations Research Society.

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Trade-offs in the landside operations of air cargo hubs: Horizontal cooperation and shipment consolidation policies considering capacitated nodes

2022 , Romero-Silva, Rodrigo , Mujica Mota, Miguel

Landside operations in air cargo terminals consist of many freight forwarders (FFWs) delivering and picking up cargo at the capacity-constrained loading docks at the airport's ground handlers' (GHs) facilities. To improve the operations of the terminal and take advantage of their geographical proximity a small set of FFWs can build a coalition to consolidate stochastically-arriving shipments and share truck fleet capacity while other FFWs continue bringing cargo to the terminal in a non-cooperative manner. Results from a detailed discrete-event simulation model of the cargo landside operations in Amsterdam Aiport showed that all operational policies had trade-offs in terms of the average shipment cycle time of coalition FFWs, the average shipment cycle time of non-coalition FFWs, and the total distance traveled by the coalition fleet, suggesting that horizontal cooperation in this context was not always beneficial, contrary to what previous studies on horizontal cooperation have found. Since dock capacity constitutes a significant constraint on operations in air cargo hubs, this paper also investigates the effect of dock capacity utilization and horizontal cooperation on the performance of consolidation policies implemented by the coalition. Thus, we built a general model of the air cargo terminal to analyze the effects caused by dock capacity utilization without the added complexity of landside operations at Amsterdam Airport to investigate whether the results hold for more general scenarios. Results from the general simulation model suggest that, in scenarios where dock and truck capacity become serious constraints, the average shipment cycle times of non-coalition FFWs are reduced at the expense of an increase in the cycle times of FFWs who constitute the coalition. A good balance among all the performance measures considered in this study is reached by following a policy that takes advantage of consolidating shipments based on individual visits to GH.