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Although there are many potential benefits associated with the use of virtual product development teams, exploiting these benefits requires an appropriate management. Managing virtual product development team is a critical issue as many of these teams fail to accomplish their goals. Review of previous literature shows that body of knowledge in managing virtual product development teams is fragmented and inconsistent. The main objective of this paper is to categorize the previous research on the subject of virtual product development team management in order to integrate the research into a thematic model and to enable recommendations for future research. So, this study reviews and summarizes empirical research in the field, also conceptual and qualitative papers, experiences, reports and explorative case studies. Results show that there are three fields of research in this area, including: Virtual production and Virtual team in Product Development, Managing virtual team in R&D[1] and product development, Managing global virtual product development teams. In order to organize previous studies in this area, a thematic map is proposed which shows the structure and sequence of research. Finally, a comprehensive discussion on the future directions in this field is proposed.



[1] Research & Development

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This paper presents an inventory model for deteriorating items in which shortages are allowed. It is assumed that the production rate is proportional to the demand rate and greater than demand rate. The inventory model is developed by considering four different circumstances. The optimal of the problem is obtained with the help of Mathematica 7 software. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the model for different parameters. Sensitivity analysis of the model has been developed to examine the effect of changes in the values of the different parameters for optimal inventory policy. Truncated Taylor’s series is used for finding closed form optimal solution.

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This paper investigates an EPQ model with the increasing demand and demand dependent production rate involving the trade credit financing policy, which is seldom reported in the literatures. The model considers the manufacturer was offered by the supplier a delayed payment time. It is assumed that the demand is a linear increasing function of the time and the production rate is proportional to the demand. That is, the production rate is also a linear function of time. This study attempts to offer a best policy for the replenishment cycle and the order quantity for the manufacturer to maximum its profit per cycle. First, the inventory model is developed under the above situation. Second, some useful theoretical results have been derived to characterize the optimal solutions for the inventory system. The Algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal solutions of the manufacturer. Finally, the numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the theorems, and the sensitivity analysis of the optimal solutions with respect to the parameters of the inventory system is performed. Some important management insights are obtained based on the analysis.

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In this study, a bi-objective model for integrated planning of production-distribution in a multi-level supply chain network with multiple product types and multi time periods is presented. The supply chain network including manufacturers, distribution centers, retailers and final customers is proposed. The proposed model minimizes the total supply chain costs and transforming time of products for customers in the chain. The proposed model is in the class of linear integer programming problems. The complexity of the problem is large and in the literatur, this problem has been shown to be NP-hard. Therefore, for solving this problem, two multi objective meta-heuristic approaches based on Pareto method including non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and non-dominated Ranking Genetic Algorithm (NRGA) have been suggested. Since the output of meta- heuristic algorithms are highly dependent on the input parameters of the algorithm, Taguchi method (Taguchi) is used to tune the parameters. Finally, in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution methods, different test problems with different dimensions have been produced and the performances of the proposed algorithms on the test problems have been analyzed.