Production Systems and Supply Chain Management in Emerging Countries: Best Practices

The book presents several highly selected cases in emerging countries where the production-logistics systems have been optimized or improved with the support of mathematical models. The book contains a selection of papers from the 5th International Conference on Production Research (ICPR) Americas 2010 held on July 21-23 in Bogota, Colombia. The main topic of the conference was “Technologies in Logistics and Manufacturing for Small and Medium Enterprises” which is perfectly aligned with the realities of emerging countries. The book presents methodologies and case studies related to a wide variety of production/logistics systems such as diary production, auto parts, steel and iron production, and financial services. It is focused but not limited to Small/Medium Enterprises.

Gonzalo Mejia is an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota Colombia. He teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is also the Director of the Production and Logistics Research Group of the same Department. He obtained his Bs and MSc degrees from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Universidad de los Andes and his PhD degree from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Lehigh University (USA). His main research interests are production planning, scheduling and logistics. He has published his works on important journals and on a number of conferences worldwide. He is Board Member of the International Foundation of Production Research (IFPR) and active member of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) and of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). Nubia Velasco, Ph.D. Holds a Ph.D. (2006) in Applied Production and Automation (in French, Automatique et Productique Appliquee at the Universite Nantes in France. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at the Universidad de los Andes. Her research interests include evolutionary optimization, metaheuristics and optimization applied to logistics, and particularly, to the vehicle routing problem and health care systems.