This book was written for anyone who is interested in quantitative approaches for studying
supply chains. This includes people from a wide range of disciplines, such as industrial
engineering/operations research, mathematics, management, economics, computer science,
and finance. This also includes students (primarily graduate students), faculty, researchers,
and practitioners of supply chain theory. And it includes scholars who are new to supply
chain theory and want a gentle but rigorous introduction to it, or scholars who are well
versed in the field and want a refresher or a reference for the seminal models. Finally, since
you are holding this book, it most likely includes you.
One of the hallmarks—and, in our opinion, the great pleasures—of supply chain theory
is that it makes use of a wide variety of the tools of operations research, mathematics,
and computer science. In this book, you will find mathematical programming models (linear, integer, nonlinear, conic, stochastic, robust), duality theory, optimization techniques (Lagrangian relaxation, column generation, dynamic programming, line search, plus optimization by calculus and finite differences), heuristics and approximations, probability, stochastic processes, game theory, combinatorics, simulation, and complexity theory.