Research into the area of supply chain

Albert Corominas

Jan 2017 · OmniaScience

About this ebook

 Prospective doctoral students or anybody who wishes to undertake research activities find often difficult to know what research is about, how the settings are where research takes place, and how results are presented and communicated. In addition, for people who want to make innovative contributions within an organization is important to tell apart research from what is not, and where to find the results.

In the supply chain field, there are two additional difficulties. On the one hand, the lack of a generally accepted definition of supply chain. On the other, the fact that, alongside research publications, others proliferate that, although being rather informative, speculative or even falling in self-help literature field, are sometimes presented as if they were search results.

The text is a tool to answer the questions implicit in the above considerations, in order to reduce the time elapsed between the moment the student decides to do research and when he or she starts to really do it, and thus contribute to improve productivity and quality of research.

About the author

Albert Corominas is an emeritus professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where he is a member of Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering, the Department of Business Administration, and the ETSEIB. He has degrees in computer science from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and in engineering from the Universidad de Valladolid (UVa), and a PhD from UVa. After having worked as a consultant, he has been teaching, for more than forty years, at the UPC and other universities. He has participated in numerous research projects and contracts. His research activities focus on modelling and solving, by means of optimisation techniques, industrial engineering problems and on the development of concepts and methodology for the design of supply chains. He is author or co-author of books and papers that have been published in AoOR, C&IE, C&OR, EJOR, IJFMS, IJPE, IJPR, INFOR, Interfaces, JoSch, JORS, Omega and ORL among other journals. Dr. Corominas is a member of the research groups EOLI (UPC), and of several scientific societies and editorial boards, including that of the International Journal of Production Research.