Prestigious Transportation Journal Features Six Different ODU Business Faculty Members in the Same Edition

October 10, 2014

Wayne Talley

Old Dominion University's Maritime and Supply Chain Management (MSCM) of the Strome College of Business has been recognized as among the world's best.

More tangible proof of this was just published, as almost every member of ODU's MSCM research area was recently published in one of the top journals in the field, "Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review."

"This is quite noteworthy and thus is another indication of the academic strength of the MSCM discipline," said Wayne Talley, Frederick W. Beazley professor of economics and director of ODU's Maritime Institute.

Talley, an eminent scholar is lead author on one of three papers featuring ODU faculty in this issue of the journal, an article entitled "Port service chains and port performance evaluation."

In the study, Talley worked with fellow ODU faculty members ManWo Ng, assistant professor of modeling, simulation and visualization engineering; and Erika Marsillac, assistant professor of information technology and decision sciences, to develop a novel methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of a port's individual services by utilizing a port service chain that incorporates quality-of-service relationships among the services.

Also in this journal, professor Ling Li, and associate professor David Cook, also of the MSCM area in the Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, published the paper "Enhancing green supply chain initiatives via empty container reuse." The ODU scholars analyze the maritime industry's commitment to green supply chain management, demonstrating that re-use of empty containers not only adds value to a firm, but leads to waste reduction in the supply chain.

In addition, new faculty member Shuaian Wang, collaborates on the paper "Simultaneous optimization of schedule coordination and cargo allocation for liner container shipping networks."

Wang, assistant professor of information technology and decision sciences, was part of a study that developed a mathematic programming model to maximize a freight carrier's profitability by optimizing ship route scheduling and an interrelated cargo allocation scheme.

Studies such as this are why Old Dominion University was cited as one of the leading research institutions in the world in port research.

ODU's expertise in port research stretches back decades, in part because of the university's location near a major, deepwater port, but also because of the work of ODU faculty researchers.

ODU co-hosted the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) annual conference in Norfolk in July. At the 2012 IAME conference in Santiago, Chile, worldwide university rankings for port research over the past 30 years were presented. ODU was ranked eighth in the world in these prestigious rankings, second only to the University of Washington in the Western Hemisphere. Research results such as these will only continue to improve ODU's stature in the field.