Professor Cheng has co-authored 15 books and published over 900 research papers in SCI/SSCI journals including California Management Review, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, and Organization Science. He was the most productive production/operations management researcher in the world over half a century from 1959 to 2008 (International Journal of Production Economics, 2009).

Professor Cheng has earned numerous accolades. Among them are the Rh Award for outstanding contribution to scholarship and research from the University of Manitoba, Canada (1989); the Outstanding Young Engineer of the Year Award from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, USA (1992); the Croucher Award (the Croucher Senior Research Fellowship) from The Croucher Foundation, Hong Kong (2001); Bronze Medal received at the 38th International Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva (2010) for the project "Intelligent context-aware decision support system for monitoring of container terminal operations"; the Education Leadership Award from the World Education Congress of CMO Asia (2014); appointment of Academician of The International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (2016); and elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences (2018).