Honored to Have Our Supply Chain Network Equilibrium Paper Recognized in the 25 Year Retrospective of the Journal Transportation Research E: Logistics and Transportation Review

 Academics work very hard on their research and enjoy seeing their work published. One also hopes that one's work is appreciated and recognized and, in academia, getting cited and also doing impactful research is deeply rewarding.

I'd like to first congratulate all the Editors of the journal Transportation Research E: Logistics and Transportation Review on the significant milestone - its 25th anniversary. I did serve on the Editorial Board of this journal for several years but am no longer doing so.

I was delighted to see a 25 year retrospective on the publications in this journal published recently by the two Co-Editors, T-M. Choi and Qiang Meng, with Shukai Chen. 

In the retrospective, the authors recognized the most highly cited articles on various themes that have dominated the journal over the past 25 years.

The paper, "A Supply Chain Network Equilibrium Model," which I co-authored with June Dong and Ding Zhang, was the top cited paper in "network modeling." Dong and Zhang are Professors at SUNY Oswego, and both were my PhD students at UMass Amherst.

In fact, this paper, is among my top cited works according also to Google Scholar:

I also very much appreciate what the authors of the retrospective wrote in the following: "Another noticeable feature is that, although the universities in the United States may not publish a very high number of papers, their research work can be very impactful and attract lots of citations, e.g., the University of Maryland and the University of Massachusetts Amherst."  Thanks for this. We work as a team at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001.

Plus, from the following tables, it is great to see the research that we have done at UMass Amherst on supply chains and on networks, two of the "hot topics" in the journal over the years, noted.

Congratulations are in order to all those whose research has been recognized in this 25 year retrospective! I'd also like to thank the authors of the retrospective for their thorough analysis and very interesting highlights of the contributions in the journal over the past quarter century. I look forward to many more interesting and important findings in the next 25 years in logistics and transportation, themes that have never been more important than they are now!

Of course, many thanks to all those who have cited our work!

On Being a Proud Academic Mom

When your children surprise you by doing something unexpected and wonderful, they certainly make a mother proud.

I have been smiling all morning since I heard that a group of my former students at the Isenberg School, all of whom received their PhDs in Management Science from UMass Amherst, co-authored a paper, which has now been accepted for publication.

I was the chair of their doctoral dissertation committees.

Yes, we in academia, consider genealogy, especially of the academic kind, to be important; see a recent blogpost and links on this.

Not only is the topic of the paper so timely -- that of closed loop supply chains (CLSCs) -- but the team is made up of four, Assistant and Full Professors, who hail from the states of Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, and Washington.

The paper, The Closed-loop Supply Chain Network with Competition, Distribution Channel Investment, and Uncertainties, Qiang Qiang, Ke Ke, Trisha Anderson, and June Dong, has been accepted in the journal, OMEGA.

In this paper, the authors developed a CLSC network model, consisting of raw material suppliers, manufacturers, and retail outlets. The demand of the retailers was satisfied either by newly manufactured products or by remanufactured products which were deemed comparable to the new ones in function and quality. The consumers were indifferent in their demand for either products.

The authors assumed that the manufacturers collected the recycled product directly from the demand market, similar to the operations of Hewlett-Packard and Xerox Corporation regarding printer cartridges.

The model has a sufficient level of complexity to capture the major environmental and behavioral as well as pricing issues, while, at the same time, being both theoretically sound and computable (very important for practice and analytics).

In the paper, the authors note that:

The volume of waste is growing at an alarming rate and environmental recovery is an option that is underutilized since firms are unsure how to mitigate the ambiguity surrounding economic performance. By providing clarification of reverse supply chain issues, and firms re-examine their recovery efforts, the environmental benefits can be pronounced, for example, reducing landfill space, reducing air pollution, and leveraging the earth’s natural resources, to name a few. Equipped with our model, one can “fine- tune” the parameters to study the behaviors of different decision makers in the CLSC, which also can generate some implications for the policy maker.

Nothing can make a Mom prouder than when her "children" soar!