Research in Production Systems and Management: “How to” and Lessons

This paper has multiple objectives. The first motivation comes from the fact that research in production systems and management is challenging, and it is even harder to teach a beginning researcher or graduate student how to embark on good research. In this regard of research pedagogy, we outline salient research principles behind conducting research in the design of manufacturing systems. Arguably, these are more widely applicable to research in other domains; nevertheless, our interest and illustrative examples are closely drawn from the manufacturing systems context. The second purpose is to pay tribute to my academic advisers, Profs. Jean-Marie Proth and George Harhalakis, for all that they taught me and so I can use my personal example to illustrate these research principles. Finally, we include a specific research area of supply chain/network design to illustrate modeling and algorithmic developments under various production situations.