LCL PhD student Melvin Drent represented the Luxembourg centre in Houston.
The 29th annual conference of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) took place from 4 to 7 May in Houston (TX, USA). This conference was well-attended with more than 1500 participants from around the world, making it an excellent environment to meet and network with scholars, researchers and practitioners as well as to present and receive feedback on research and to explore new ideas.
MIT professor Yossi Sheffi, Director of the partnering MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), delivered a keynote related to his recently published book « When to Embrace Sustainability in Business (and When Not To)« . In his talk, Yossi briefly examined the trade-offs companies face when coping with sustainability issues.
During the conference, parallel sessions were devoted to a wide range of topics, including additive manufacturing, the sharing economy, big data and cloud computing, data analytics in urban logistics, blockchain applications in businesses, and healthcare operations.
In the sessions focusing on inventory management research, LCL PhD student Melvin Drent presented his paper « Expediting in Two-Echelon Spare Parts Inventory Systems« . This paper, which is co-authored by Prof. Joachim Arts, addresses spare part control and repair optimization in a complex network. Through rigorously combining techniques from both stochastic modelling and deterministic optimisation, Melvin and Joachim showed that cost savings up to 15 percent are possible when decisions on repair priorities and spare parts management are integrated in a smart way.
Read the full paper in the open repository of the University of Luxembourg.