Structuring the production environment for joint academic and practical problem solving

The purpose of this paper is to support production researchers in positioning their operations research models, enhance model validation and motivate production managers to be an integral part of this process. This paper lists and structures characeristics that define a generic production environment. The characteristics were gathered from a large number of scientific and practically-oriented studies and surveys that deal with one or more production aspects; they are structured so that model elements, scope, bounds, and assumptions can more easily be attributed to the real production context. A knowledge-oriented problem-solving procedure utilizing this framework is suggested. Hopefully both production researchers and production managers will jointly follow it.