New Perspectives in Operations Research and Management Science: Essays in Honor of Fusun Ulengin

This book presents innovative operations research applications in business, specifically industrial engineering and its sub-disciplines. It investigates new perspectives in operations research and management science with regard to research methods, the research context, and industrial engineering, offering readers a broad range of new approaches to management problems. The book features the latest work of researchers who have worked with Professor Fusun Ulengin or built upon her work in their academic careers.

Written in honor of Prof. Ulengin, this book was edited by her former Ph.D. students, who are now experts in operations research, multiple criteria decision making, competitiveness, logistics, and supply chain management.

Prof. Ulengin’s impact in academia is visible in the range of topics and methodologies featured in this book: Location and transportation problems, competitiveness of nations, food supply chains, debt collection, mathematical modelling, multiple criteria decision making, data envelopment analysis, random forests, and Bayesian networks.

Y. Ilker Topcu is a Professor of Decision Sciences at the Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey. He visited Leeds University Business School from 1998 through 1999 as a visiting researcher and received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering Management from ITU in 2000. His Ph.D. thesis, titled “Integrated decision aid model for multi-attribute problem solving”, was supervised by Prof. Ülengin. More recently, he held a visiting professor position at the Katz Business School, University of Pittsburgh, USA, from 2018 through 2019. Dr. Topcu has been an executive committee member of the International Society of Multiple Criteria Decision Making since 2015. His research interests include multiple criteria decision making, decision analysis, and OR/MS. He has published several journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings. His latest books are edited volumes entitled “Operations Research Applications in Health Care Management” in 2018 and “Multiple Criteria Decision Making – Beyond the Information Age” in 2021.

Sule Önsel Ekici is a Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa, Turkey. She graduated from Istanbul Technical University (Management Faculty, Department of Industrial Engineering) in 1993 and received her MSc. Degree in 1995 and a Ph.D. degree in 2002 from the same university. Her Ph.D. thesis, titled “A Dynamic Scenario Analysis with the Help of Artificial Neural Networks”, was supervised by Prof. Ülengin. Her research topics are decision support systems, multicriteria decision making, neural networks, scenario analysis, cognitive and Bayesian maps. She mainly focuses on modelling complex systems such as transportation, logistics systems, and socio-economic systems. Her refereed articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Transport Policy, Transportation Research Part A and Part C, Expert Systems with Applications, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, European Journal of Operational Research, and International Journal of Production Research.

Özgür Kabak is a Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University (ITU-IE). He completed his Ph.D. thesis titled “Modelling supply chain network using possibilistic linear programming and an application” under the supervision of Prof. Ülengin in 2009. He then spent one year at Belgium Nuclear Research Centre for post-doc research that was granted by Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO). He teaches undergraduate and graduate education courses in operations research, group decision-making, and logistics management. His research explores how to model complex systems such as socio-economic systems, productions systems, supply chains, logistics and transportation systems, etc., and how to make decisions in group decision making environments and incomplete information situations. He has published in indexed journals, including the European Journal of Operations Research, Information Fusion, Transport Policy, Knowledge-based Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, etc.

Emel Aktas is the Professor of Supply Chain Analytics at Cranfield University, Centre for Logistics, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management. She specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, decision support systems, and statistical analysis to address supply chains problems, specifically in the healthcare, retail, and manufacturing sectors. Her recent research focuses on food supply chain management, with one project (SAFE-Q) on minimizing the waste in food supply chains and another (U-TURN) on logistics collaboration practices for food distribution in the cities. Her work has appeared in the European Journal of Operational Research, Interfaces, International Journal of Production Economics, and Computers and Human Behaviour. Her Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Prof. Ülengin from 2004 to 2010, investigated designing supply chain contracts to improve supply chain coordination.

Özay Özaydin is an assistant professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of Dogus University. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University Aeronautical Engineering in 2002 and got his MSc. in Engineering Management and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the same university. His teaching and research topics are Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Product and Process Development, Decision Making, Logistics, and Transportation. He has published journal articles in Interfaces, Transport Policy, European Journal of Operational Research, Knowledge-Based Systems, International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, and Research in Transportation Economics. Together with Prof. Ülengin, he is co-chairing the SIG E1 – Transport System Analysis and Economic Evaluation at the World Conference on Transport Research Society. He has been working with Prof. Ülengin since 2005, including his Ph.D. thesis period where he evaluated the critical road structures in Istanbul.