Solving Engineering, Project, and Production Management Problems through Modeling

Solving Engineering, Project, and Production Management Problems through Modeling

This issue presents five papers covering engineering management, project management, and production management. While distinct, these three fields frequently overlap and share common managerial concepts, e.g. solving problems through modeling. “Impact Analysis of Headway Distributions on Single-Lane Roundabout Entry Capacity” by Liang Ren and Xiaobo Qu from Australia's Griffith University was awarded Best Paper Award at the 2015 (6th) International Conference on Engineering, Project, and Production Management, held in Gold Coast, Australia. Here, the paper has been extended to provide additional detail about entry capacity estimation for single-lane roundabouts. The authors present a capacity model which provides improved accuracy over current models. In “Entrepreneurial Orientation vs. Innovativeness of Small and Medium Size Enterprises,” Ejdys examines the impact of entrepreneurial orientation on innovation in small and medium size enterprises. Three hypotheses are examined by Structural Equation Modeling, with results showing that proactiveness has a significant positive influence on innovativeness, and that risk taking is an intermediate variable for innovation mediated by proactivity. “Recent Trends in Theory Use and Application within the Project Management Discipline” by Johnson et al. reviews over 270 project management research articles from 1999 to 2013 to identify the five most frequently cited theories in dealing with project management issues: stakeholder theory, fuzzy sets theory, utility theory, theory of constraints, and actor-network theory. These theories are frequently used as a foundation for model development (Butler et al., 2001; Pollack et al., 2013; Rand, 2000; Shan et al., 2011).