No abstract

In the globalizing knowledge economy firms have become less reliant on local production and market networks and increasingly expand their reach to an international or global scale. The argument of this paper suggests that this has given rise to distinct geographies of knowledge transfers over distance, which rely on periodic or regular temporary face-to-face contacts. While some of these settings of temporary knowledge transfers have existed for a long time, they are now being intensively applied throughout the economy. In this paper we develop a typology of these geographies based on three dimensions that characterize the conditions for knowledge exchange: (i) framing, (ii) cognitive focus and goals, and (iii) trust and risks involved. Based on these variables, we identify three configurations and eight subcategories of knowledge transfers that build upon temporary face-to-face interaction, classified as (1) international community gatherings, (2) international business travel, and (3) transnational network relations. Systematic comparison reveals that with growing uncertainty in economic interaction and with increasing commitment between the agents, trust-based linkages tend to become more important, and the number of interacting agents declines, while the frequency of temporary face-to-face meetings increases.

No abstract

Order picking deals with the retrieval of articles from their storage locations in order to satisfy customer requests. The transformation and consolidation of customer orders into picking orders (batches) is pivotal for the performance of order picking systems. Typically, customer orders have to be completed by certain due dates in order to avoid delays in production or in the shipment to customers. The composition of the batches, their processing times, their assignment to order pickers and the sequence according to which they are scheduled determine whether and the extent to which the due dates are missed. This article shows how Variable Neighborhood Descent and Variable Neighborhood Search can be applied in order to minimize the total tardiness of a given set of customer orders. In a series of extensive numerical experiments, the performance of the two approaches is analyzed for different problem classes. It is shown that the proposed methods provide solutions which may allow order picking systems to operate more efficiently.

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