History 
 

With the founding of the Institute of Industrial Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Prof. Dr. Rainer Leisten took over and established the Chair of General Business Administration and Operations Management. From 2008 until his untimely death in 2017, he held the chair, was Dean of Studies and Chairman of the Examination Committee.

 

Prof. Dr. Rainer Leisten
 

Prof. Dr. Rainer Leisten passed away in April 2017 as incumbent holder of the Chair of General Business Administration and Operations Management at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
(Obituary of the University of Duisburg-Essen and the WAZ)

Career history

Prof. Leisten successfully completed his studies in 1981 with a diploma in mathematics from the University of Cologne and subsequently received his doctorate in 1984, also in Cologne, from the Chair of Business Administration and Production Management under Prof. Dr. Ellinger. After a three-year intermezzo as controller at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt (Main), Prof. Leisten returned to the research environment in 1988. At the University of Heidelberg, he was habilitated at the Chair of Business Administration and Operations Research by Prof. Dr. Liesegang.

Building on the venia legendi he received, Prof. Leisten, after having held the chair for five months as deputy professor, headed the Chair of Business Administration and Production Management at the University of Greifswald for four years. Finally, in 1999, he followed the desire to work closer to home again and accepted the call of the then still independent University of Duisburg to head the Chair of General Business Administration and Production Management at the Mercator School of Management. When the merger of the universities of Duisburg and Essen to form the University of Duisburg-Essen was accelerated, not only was the chair - now under the name of general business administration and production management - integrated, Prof. Leisten also took over the position of founding rector for studies and teaching for three years between 2003 and 2006 in the course of this process.

Finally, in 2008, the entire Chair of Industrial Engineering was to be relocated for the last time, which resulted in a renaming of the Chair of Business Administration and Operations Management. Prof. Leisten taught at this chair until the end. During this time Prof. Leisten again took over university political offices, namely the management of the examination board as well as the position of Dean of Studies. He also became course coordinator for the newly created "Industrial Engineering" course, which has continuously achieved good results in the CHE ranking since its introduction and whose internationality he actively promoted, both through student exchanges and through scientific cooperation.

Post mortem, Prof. Leisten was also awarded the Diversity Prize for Managers in 2018 in recognition of his commitment and homophilic leadership style.

In the course of his scientific activities, which also included continuous reviewer activities, Prof. Leisten published numerous articles in international journals, for conferences, book contributions and his own reference books.

Selected Publications

"Heuristic rules for tie-breaking in the implementation of the NEH heuristic for permutation flow-shop scheduling." (mit Rajendran, Suchithra und Chandrasekharan Rajendran) International Journal of Operational Research 28.1 (2017): 87-97.

"A computational evaluation of constructive and improvement heuristics for the blocking flow shop to minimise total flowtime, (mit Fernandez-Viagas, Victor, und Jose M. Framinan), Expert Systems with Applications 61 (2016): 290-301.

“Manufacturing Scheduling Systems - An Integrated View on Models, Methods and Tools" (mit J. Framinan und R. Ruiz), Springer-Verlag, United Kingdom, 2014.

“From competitive to collaborative supply networks: A simulation study” (mit R. R. Rodriguez und P. Perez), in: Applied Mathematical Modelling, Bd. 35 (2011), S. 1054-1064.

“Review and Classification of Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problems from a Production Systems and a Solutions Procedure Perspective” (mit I. Ribas und J. Framinan), Invited Review in: Computers & Operations Research, Bd. 37 (2010), Nr. 8, S. 1439-1454.

"Convergence Aspects of Adaptive Clustering in Variable Aggregation" (mit K. Jörnsten und S. Storøy), in: Computers & Operations Research, Bd. 26 (1999), S. 955-966.