Welcome note

摘要

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of the international Joumal of Supply Chain and Inventory Management. The idea for this new journal, which is part of the Inderscience Publisher, originated approx. two years ago, from the research activities we carried out starting from 2008. In that year, we started studying supply chain management and inventory management problems with the use of simulation techniques. The results of our first study are published in the paper titled 'Supply chain design and cost analysis through simulation' [by Bottani, E. and Montanari, R. (2010) International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 48, No. 10, pp.2859-2886]. In a subsequent work, we studied supply network design with simulation techniques [cf. Bottani, E. and Montanari, R. (2011) 'Design and performance evaluation of supply networks: a simulation study', International Journal Business Performance and Supply Chain Modelling, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp.226-269]. When preparing those works and studying the related literature, we found that there are several issue related to inventory management, supply chain and logistics that could be investigated, exploiting both simulation techniques, analytic models and intelligent algorithms. At the same time, we noticed that there were no scientific journals expressively devoted to the interdependences among those topics, resulting in the related literature being fragmented and disseminated among several general purpose journals. We came to the conclusion that there was the need of a journal expressively devoted to the topics of inventory and supply chain management, since this is an emerging research field, with potentials to generate a wide number of research papers in the future.