Opportunities for operations research in the new manufacturing

Manufacturing has always been a fertile source of research problems for the present field. In the last two decades, there have been some dramatic changes in manufacturing including new technologies like flexible manufacturing systems, new ideas like Just-in-Time and Total Quality Control and a generally increased status for manufacturing within corporations. These new ideas and developments often seem so fundamentally different from the kinds of issues that have been studied that one might question whether there is a role to play in the new manufacturing. The author believes there is, but achieving this role will require research that emphasizes close observation of real world phenomena and creativity in extracting interesting problems and models. The purpose of this paper is to survey some examples from an emerging body of research that is very much in this vein. The author’s hope is to encourage a broader group of operations researchers to grapple with some of the exciting new issues in manufacturing.