Rapid Modelling for Increasing Competitiveness

A Perspective on Two Decades of Rapid Modeling It is an honor for me to be asked to write a foreword to the Proceedings of the 1st Rapid Modeling Conference. In 1987, when I coined the term 'Rapid Modeling' to denote queuing modeling of manufacturing systems, I never imagined that two decades later there would be an international conference devoted to this topic! I am delighted to see that there will be around 40 presentations at the conference by leading researchers from aroundthe world, and about half of these presentationsare represented by written papers published in this book. I congratulate the conference organizers and program committee on the success of their efforts to hold the ?rst ever conference on Rapid Modeling. Attendees at this conferencemight?nd it interesting to learn about the history of the term Rapid Modeling in the context it is used here. During the fall of 1986 I was invited to a meeting at the Headquarters of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) in Dearborn, Michigan. By that time I had successfully demonstrated s- eral industry applications of queuing network models at leading manufacturers in the USA. Although in principle the use of queuing networks to model manufact- ing systems was well known in the OR/MS community and many papers had been published,the actual use of suchmodelsby manufacturingprofessionalswas almost nonexistent.

Gerald Reiner studied Business Administration in Vienna after an education in Industrial Engineering. In 2001 he received his Doctorate in Business Administration (Quality Management and Production Management) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, where he later received his Habilitation (venia legendi).

Between 1999 and 2006 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Production Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He served as visiting professor at Aston Business School (UK) in March 2006 and also at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) from March 2007 to June 2007.

Since February 2007 Gerald Reiner has been a full professor at the Enterprise Institute at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His research interests lie in the fields of supply chain management, quality management and operations management. He has published articles in International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Operations Management Research, and other leading journals, as well as books and numerous book chapters.