Contributions and Challenges in the Design of Production Systems

A revolution has occurred over the past hundred years in the variety of products available to improve our personal and professional lives. While new scientific discoveries enabled conceptualization of these products, it has been the innovations in operations that have made these products widely available and affordable to an increasing number of individuals. These innovations have been led by industrial engineering and operations research. In this talk we discuss the major innovations that have led to economic development and improved quality of life and then address the remaining challenges for production systems researchers. While basic procedures such as process mapping and standards are mentioned, focus will be on deterministic and probabilistic, descriptive and prescriptive, mathematical and computational models as well as new paradigms in system design. While these efforts have been highly successful we will look at some of the key technical and socio-technical issues that remain unsolved providing ample challenges and opportunities for production system researchers.