The goal of this workshop is to bring together SMOR (Service, Manufacturing, and Operations Research) grantees and researchers with the purpose of identifying promising future research directions with significant impact on theory and practice. The workshop will also serve as a grantees conference in which the attending grantees will have the opportunity to display and present posters on their current grants. It is also our expectation that the interactions between participants will pave the way for collaborative research agendas among them in the future.
This workshop is motivated by the new SMOR program structure, which includes the ingredients -- applications, data, and methodologies -- and the need to identify future directions via collaboration of researchers and practitioners from each of the three ingredients. The workshop will facilitate discussions on three interconnected topics including societal impact, analytics and curricular updates, and interface with human behavior and organization behavior/change. Following state-of-the-art keynotes on methods (optimization and data science) and applications (healthcare systems, supply chains and service systems, energy systems and sustainability, and manufacturing systems/cybermanufacturing) to set the stage, multiple breakout sessions with 10-12 participants will be formed to discuss future directions of research that connect methodologies and applications through data availability (with both increased size and variety available today) for realistic applications with societal impact. A second topic of discussion will focus on the efficiency and effectiveness at the interface between typical SMOR program research areas, which by and large focus on the design of systems and processes for low-touch products and services, and the high-touch systems in which the customer has a direct relationship with the provider (i.e., incorporating both the human and organizational behavior aspects). Finally, in the wake of explosion in data availability and many recent practices it facilitates, the workshop will provide the opportunity to identify a roadmap for curricular changes in teaching OR/MS theory and practice to next generation of engineers and business leaders.
