Readers may wonder what computer specialists can find in a book devoted to supply chain engineering. At first, the two topics do not seem to have much in common. The reader may be astonished to find how useful this book can be: it presents many theories and problems that computer scientists can use as background knowledge, and various problems related to quite a distant field have the same structure as a few well-known concepts--a good example is vehicle transportation, which shares many methods with network routing. Basically, the book overviews different issues related to operations research in supply chain engineering. This might be a little bit exotic from a research viewpoint, but operations research uses extensively the same methods as computing and networking.

The book consists of 13 chapters. This review focuses on those topics and techniques that are apparently common to different technologies, especially computing and networking. Chapter 2 presents the basics of planning (for example, a sketch of different optimization problems, like linear programming with duality and algorithm complexity) and a performance evaluation methodology. The next chapter focuses on forecasting, dealing mainly with classification methods. Chapter 4 presents a related topic: time series analysis. The three chapters on routing are interesting, with an emphasis on single flow in chapter 6, multiple flows in chapter 7, and roundtrips in chapter 8. While the next two chapters focus on transportation systems--they cover scheduling and inventory systems--they are useful from an optimization viewpoint and can also be informative due to an interesting discussion of background mathematical tools.

Although not all parts of the book are equally interesting, many of them are very useful, as noted above. The problems are thoroughly explained, and thus it might be considered a good textbook on various theoretical techniques. Its value is increased because it is clearly aimed at self-study, with many well-described examples and tests to check the reader’s comprehension of the material. Possibly the most important advantage of a book is that it opens the reader’s mind--perhaps he or she is an engineer or a young researcher--to other contexts, which can be a source of inspiration and creativity.