Advances of operations research in service industry

Service industry has received increasing interest in recent years. The economies in industrialized nations across the world have become more service oriented. The workforce employed in services continued to grow in developed economies during the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s. At the beginning of 2000, in several OECD countries, about three quarters of employees were working in the service sector [1]. In 2007, the world’s biggest source of employment was for the first time the service sector, rather than agriculture and industry. About 40% of the world’s workers were employed in the service sector, compared with 38.7% in agriculture and 21.3% in industry. About fifteen years ago, 43.1% of employees worked in agriculture, and only 35.5% in the service sector. It was predicted that in future the service sector would provide more than half of global employment opportunities [2]. It is obvious that services are playing a key role in today’s global economy, and such trend can be expected to continue in the future. As a result, the importance of studying the service industry in operations research (OR) perspectives has been increasing. An OR perspective can help better address the mathematical characteristics involve with service industries and possibly provide a framework, which will foster the development of formal models of service systems. Service industry is one of the most challenging sectors in industrial and economic development; and new management theories as well as the material flow theory, which can be applied to the service sector, have been proposed [3–8]. A variety of service industry paradigms have been developed to tackle the challenges. There are many research issues needed to be addressed using the methods including mathematical modeling and optimization; as such, a variety of OR models have been developed to tackle these challenges [9–11]. Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that understanding service industries as well as its quantitative aspects are a required component of doing business. As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the OR methods in the service sector. To respond to the market needs from both academic researchers and practitioners, and to communicate research results on OR in service industries, this special issue provides an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in OR in service industries. This special issue of Computers and Operations Research presents thirteen papers. The purpose of this special issue is to report on the state-of-the-art of, and emerging trends in, research and practice in OR in the service sector. To prepare for this issue, all