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Comment by pjot | Hacker News Reader

I have a masters in supply chain - a large portion of that degree as well as a topic that overlaps math and computer science is operations research [0].

Google has some pretty cool open-source libraries [1] for working with OR type problems as well. Their guide explains some common problems from a high level and should give you some more keywords and topics to dive into as well.

I'd also recommend MIT's SCM course [2], it has a solid curriculum

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research [1] https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/over... [2] https://micromasters.mit.edu/scm/

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Oooh, looks like there's a lot more complex math in this area than I'd initially thought (although I imagine the math that is there is more of the stuff that is used in CS?).

Thank you for the link to that micromasters program, that looks like a great course to try first for SCM, I'll check out other courses that are marked as related on the MOOC page as well

I like what you said in the first line.

Personally, I'm less interested in the 'management' aspect of this topic, and more interested in the "process" or the idea, so to speak.

I think supply chain is a big idea and a big topic in itself, and how you manage it, when put in charge of human labor, in only one part of it.

And I think there is some relation between 'supply chain' and 'concurrency' in CS.

There is a certain tendency I see, especially in recent grads in the SCM, of learning a lot of operations research. Which totally valid, these gals and guys are running circles around me as gar as big data and data science is concerned.

One should not forget so, that supply chains and logistics are still running on a huge amount of physical paper. Process is still king. The basic principles don't change simply because thing become digital. Take a classic Kanban system. That still runs on a piece of cardboard. Using fax to sent Kanban cards around is probably all the amount of digitalization that needs. And Kanbans are still one of the most robust solutions around.

From what I learned about CS so far, both fields are very logical. So go ahead and learn about the idea. Interesting field, and one that can only benefit from innovative solutions!

I recently presented my master's thesis exactly on a process involving kanbans. I implemented a discrete event simulator that compares different dynamic scheduling agent policies of which one is a MIP optimization model. All very cool, but the company still uses paper kanbans and the whole process is far from the so called "industry 4.0". All in all, change costs and the change needs to give enough fruits to justify it.

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