Production systems engineering: Problems, solutions, and applications

Production systems engineering (PSE) is an emerging branch of engineering intended to uncover fundamental principles of production systems and utilize them for analysis, continuous improvement, and design. In PSE, manufacturing systems are addressed based on first principles and at the same level of rigor as that in other engineering disciplines. This paper is intended to give a general characterization of PSE and consider, in some details, several PSE problems. Specifically, the problems of performance analysis, bottlenecks, leanness, system-theoretic properties, and transient behavior are addressed. In addition, several case studies are described and the PSE Toolbox, which implements the techniques and algorithms developed, is presented.