Our Paper with Colleagues in Italy on Flexible Production Networks and Environmental Regulations is Published!

It is now the holiday season so one needs to find moments of joy, despite so many horrific events and challenges. I am very grateful to my wonderful collaborators.

The same day as the mass casualty event at my alma mater, Brown University, a paper that I co-authored with colleagues at the University of Catania in Italy: Dr. Gabriella Colajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele, and Dr. Daniele Sciacca, was published in the European Journal of Operational Research and it is open access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221725009786

Also, at about the same time, we received a huge package of chocolates from one of these co-authors, which brought light in this time of darkness.

We will be enjoying the chocolates for many weeks and will also be sharing them. 

Thank you for the friendships across the miles and for the outstanding community of Operations Researchers.

Let peace and freedom and righteousness prevail as we come to the end of the 2025 year.

Supernetwork Associates Prominent at POMS Conference in Seattle

This year the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) conference took place May 5-8, 2017, in fabulous Seattle, Washington. The conference happened to overlap, in part, with the Illicit Supply Network Workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, at the University of Texas Austin, and I was already committed to the workshop.

However, I still managed to have two papers of ours presented at POMS: one by my doctoral student, Deniz Besik, and the other by my former Isenberg School PhD student, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li, now an award-winning Professor at Arkansas State University.

The full presentations of these two talks can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center site.

Also, although I could not be there, one of my recent books, Competing on Supply Chain Quality,  co-authored with Michelle Li, and published by Springer, was on display at the conference.

Plus, so many of my former doctoral students, now all very successful professors, were also at POMS, including Professor June Dong of SUNY Oswego, standing below with Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland.

It is special how the members of the Supernetwork Center Team at the Isenberg School of Management continue to collaborate and support one another. 

Below in the first photo are  Supernetwork Center Associates Professors Min Yu and Michelle Li with former Supernetwork Center Associate (and also my former Isenberg School PhD student) Professor Fuminori Toyasaki of York University. Deniz, Michelle, and Fuminori, are joined by Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu of Penn State Hazleton in the second photo below. Tina and Leo also serve as Supernetwork Associates.

And at conferences we get together for a delicious meal whenever we can. Below in the photo are Professors Tina Wakolbinger, Fuminori Toyasaki, and Michelle Li.

Joining Deniz Besik, Professors Michelle Li and Min Yu in the photo above are Professor Heng Chen, an Isenberg School PhD alumnus, now a Professor at the University of Nebraska, and a friend of Deniz's from Northeastern University.

You can search the POMS conference program to find all the fascinating papers presented by the Supernetwork Center Associates on topics ranging from humanitarian logistics to supply chain competition to supplier risk management and robustness analysis, to name just a few!

I could not be at the POMS conference in Seattle but many close members of my academic family were.

And this summer, some of us will reconvene at various conferences, from the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized with Professors Ilias Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University and Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, which will take place in Kalamata, Greece, to the IFORS conference in Quebec City. And even before these, I will see Professor Tina Wakolbinger at a conference that she is organizing in Vienna on humanitarian logistics!

From Ecolabelling in Fashion to Supply Chains and Freight Quality Competition

The POMS (Production and Operations Management Society) Conference is now taking place in Washington DC.

Although I could not go since this (as happened last year as well) is graduation season at UMass Amherst,  3 of my present doctoral students are there (Shivani Shukla, Sara Saberi,  and Dong Li, who defended her PhD dissertation just lat week) presenting our joint work and one former doctoral student, Professor Min Yu of the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Oregon, is as well.

Two of  our papers are jount with my collabortaor in Sweden, Professor Jonas Floden.

Below I have posted links to our presentations. All of the presentations are based on recently published papers of ours with links also provided below.

The full presentation can be downloaded here. The presentation is based on the paper, Fashion Supply Chain Network Competition with Ecolabelling,.Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Jonas Floden, Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management: From Sourcing to Retailing, T.-M. Choi and T.C.E. Cheng, Editors, Springer (2015) pp 61-84.

The full presentation is available here. The presentation is based on the paper:  A Supply Chain Network Game Theory Model with Product Differentiation, Outsourcing of Production and Distribution, and Quality and Price Competition,, Anna Nagurney and Dong Li, Annals of Operations Research 228(1), (2015) pp 479-503.

 The full presentation can be downloaded here., And this presentation is based on our paper:  Supply Chain Network Competition in Price and Quality with Multiple Manufacturers and Freight Service Providers, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Jonas Floden, Transportation Research E 77: (2015) pp 248-267.

Needless to say, I love doing research on all aspects of supply chains and am very lucky to have such great collaborators as those above.

Mile High Conference in Production and Operations Management

Academics have such tough choices to make -- which conference to go to, which conference to present at, and which conference to, perhaps, send a collaborator to present, instead.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the most interesting conferences (or even events) happen at the same time or so close together that it may be hard to be present at both?

I returned yesterday from the Computational Management Science (CMS) conference in Montreal and wrote several posts on it, with the latest one including photos.

The CMS conference took place May 1-3, 2013, and, as luck would have it (I was on the steering committee), I presented a paper both in the first session on the first day and in the last session on the last day.

May 3 was also the first day of the Mile High Conference taking place in Denver, Colorado, and organized by the Production and Operations Management (POM) Society. This conference ends May 6, 2013.

I have two papers also at this conference and it would have been very difficult to make the first one, which was schedule for May 4, and the second one is to take place tomorrow, May 6.

So, the solution -- one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li, who is in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management, is presenting both of our papers.

Links to the full presentations are available here and here.

The first paper above has been accepted for publication in a special issue of  the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation.