Best paper award

Together with his co-authors ORL colleague Renzo Akkerman has received a 2021 Best Paper award of Omega, the International Journal of Management Science, for their contribution entitled “Strategic planning of new product introductions: integrated planning of products and modules in the automotive industry“. Omega is a top journal focused on developments in management, and an important source for practising managers, specialists in management services, operational research workers and management scientists, management consultants, academics, students and research personnel.

In this paper the authors develop a mathematical linear programming model describing the new product introduction timing problem based on the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. It simultaneously decides on the start of production date for vehicle models, variants, and engines as well as on the assignment of engines to the given variants. Integrating a multi-criteria approach, the model helps to analyze trade-offs between important managerial objectives related to resource utilization and fleet emission metrics. Using realistic data from a major European automotive company, the authors demonstrate that their model enables the efficient evaluation of various courses of action, which is an important capability in times of fast technological change such as the current transition to electrical vehicle portfolios.

Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omega.2021.102515