Focus on India

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The collection you are about to read is entitled “Focus on India.” Each of the 12 articles represents our very best coverage of the successful application of operations research in India. Each article has been specially selected from INFORMS’ suite of highly authoritative journals.

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— A Dynamic Model of Organizational Decision Making: Chemco Revisited Six Years After Bhopal (Howard Kunreuther. Edward H. Bowman, and Reginald H. Jones), Organization Science 8 (4) (1997), pp. 404–413
Dynamic model of organization decision making that is motivated by the decision-making process at a multinational chemical firm visited shortly after the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India, and again six years later

— A Multiple-Objective Policy Model: Results of an Application to a Developing Country (Augusto A. Legasto, Jr.), Management Science 24 (5) (1978), pp. 498–509
Results and implications of an application of dynamic simulation modeling to the study of control of social unrest in a developing country

— Capacity Expansion for India’s Nitrogenous Fertilizer Industry (Donald Erlenkotter and Alan S. Manne), Management Science 14 (10) (1968), pp. B-553–B-572
A preinvestment survey of a massive investment program under way to meet the increased demand for chemical fertilizers in India

— Capacity Expansion With Imports and Inventories (Donald Erlenkotter), Management Science 23 (7) (1977), pp. 694–702
An optimal expansion plan allowing inventories for determination of optimal expansion with application to India’s aluminum industry

— Improving Linkage of Web Pages (Rakesh Gupta, Amitava Bagchi, and Sumit Sarkar), INFORMS Journal on Computing 19 (1) (2007), pp. 127–136
Heuristic scheme, developed in India, based on simulated annealing that makes use of the aggregate user preference data to re-link the pages to improve navigability

— Inducing Performance in a Queue via Prices: The Case of a Riverine Port (Ani Dasgupta and Madhubani Ghosh), Management Science 46 (11) (2000),
pp. 1466–1484
Combining OR and econometric tools to study the ailing port system of Calcutta, India, and concluding that raising prices will improve both economic and engineering performances

— Investigating New Product Diffusion Across Products and Countries (Debabrata Talukdar, K. Sudhir, and Andrew Ainslie), Marketing Science 21 (1) (2002), pp. 97–114
A novel dataset that captures the diffusion of 6 products in 31 developed and developing countries including data from such emerging economies as China, India, Brazil, and Thailand

— Locating Rural Social Service Centers in India (Nitin R. Patel), Management Science 25 (1) (1979), pp. 22–30
Experience with application of operations research techniques in planning new roads and social service centers for the Dharampur area in India

— Management Education in India (M. V. Pylee), Management Science 13 (10) (1967), pp. C-209–C-217
An overview of the development of the program and allocation of management education facilities in India

— Performance Evaluation of State-Owned Enterprises in Theory and Practice (Ravi Ramamurti), Management Science 33 (7) (1987), pp. 876–893
Exploring the goal orientation of state-owned enterprises based on the case of India, where as in many other countries the government expects them to promote the “public interest” rather than maximize profits

— Performance Evaluation and Stock Allocation in Capacitated Serial Supply Systems (Diwakar Gupta and N. Selvaraju), Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM) 8 (2) (2006), pp. 169–191
What proportion of the optimal total inventory should managers allocate to upstream production stages to minimize the sum of inventory and backorder costs?

— Indian Auto-Component Supply Chain at the Crossroads (Karthik Balakrishnan, Sridhar Seshadri, Anshul Sheopuri, and Ananth Iyer), Interfaces 37 (4) (2007), pp. 310–323
Tracing the evolution of the auto-component supply chain in India beginning with the opening of the economy in 1990 by using a combination of data on firm and sector performance, customer-satisfaction surveys, and interviews with experts