An interactive metro map tracing the intellectual lineage of inventory management — from Harris's 1913 EOQ model through Clark & Scarf's multi-echelon breakthrough, the bullwhip effect, and today's approximation algorithms and machine learning methods.
Inventory theory is one of the oldest and richest branches of operations research, spanning over a century of work across hundreds of journals and thousands of researchers. This map cannot capture every important contribution — the field is simply too vast. Many excellent papers, influential textbooks, and pioneering researchers are inevitably missing from what you see here. This is a living project: we will continue expanding the tree over time, and you can help by using the + Find Papers tool to search for and add papers directly.
How to use this tool: The visualization organizes papers into 10 colored research “metro lines” flowing left to right through time. Each circle is a paper — larger circles have more citations. Hover any paper to see its details. Click a paper to highlight its citation ancestry and descendants. Dashed lines between metro lines show real cross-stream citations (sourced from OpenAlex). Use the legend to toggle research lines on and off, the search bar to find specific papers, and List view for a sortable catalog. The + Find Papers panel lets you search the OpenAlex academic database and add missing papers to the map in real time, either one at a time or in bulk using Auto-Discover.
Scroll horizontally to explore the timeline. Hover papers for details. Click to highlight lineage.
Automatically search across dozens of inventory research topics and find papers missing from your map.