2007 Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner

Dr. Arunachalam Narayanan
Assistant Professor
Dwight Look College of Engineering
Texas A&M University

“As a first-year faculty member, it is an honor to receive CSCMP’s Doctoral Dissertation Award,” said Dr. Narayanan. “The award is special to me because it is given by scholars in the field as well as leaders in the industry. This recognition encourages me to continue to examine significant issues in both academic and industry research in my future work.”

Dr. Narayanan has been a noted speaker and educator at many professional conferences of organizations like Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), and CSCMP. His teaching and research interests focus on supply chain management, industrial distribution, and mathematical programming and optimization.

Dr. Narayanan’s research has been published in the International Journal of Production Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, and Omega: The International Journal of Management Science. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras, an MS in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University, and a PhD in supply chain management from the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University.

In addition, Dr. Narayanan has developed a classroom-friendly, online version of the “beergame,” which was demonstrated at the 2006 CSCMP Annual Conference in San Antonio. The game is currently being played in undergraduate, graduate, and executive education classes at numerous universities.

Dr. Narayanan’s dissertation research focuses on coordinated lot-sizing problems in which a common set-up cost is shared among multiple product types. These problems are commonly encountered in procurement, transportation, distribution, and operations management. The new formulation and solution procedures presented in Dr. Narayanan’s research represent a marked improvement in modeling and solution technologies over those reported in academic literature and are currently being implemented in commercially-available procurement software

Improved Formulations, Heuristics and Metaheuristics for the Dynamic Demand Coordinated Lot-Sizing Problem