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Industrial engineering
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Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials, analysis andsynthesis, as well as the mathematical, physical and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems or processes. Its underlying concepts overlap considerably with certain business-oriented disciplines such as operations management, but the engineering side tends to emphasize extensivemathematical proficiency and usage of quantitative methods.
Depending on the sub-speciality(ies) involved, industrial engineering may also be known as operations management, management science, operations research, systems engineering, manufacturing engineering or ergonomics and human factors engineering / safety engineering, usually depending on the viewpoint or motives of the user. Recruiters oreducational establishments use the names to differentiate themselves from others. In health care, industrial engineers are more commonly known as health management engineers or health systems engineers.
Overview
While the term originally applied to manufacturing, the use of "industrial" in "industrial engineering" can be somewhat misleading, since it has grown to encompass any methodical orquantitative approach to optimizing how a process, system, or organization operates. Some engineering universities and educational agencies around the world have changed the term "industrial" to the broader term "production", leading to the typical extensions noted above. In fact, the primary U.S. professional organization for Industrial Engineers, the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) has beenconsidering changing its name to something broader (such as the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers), although the latest vote among membership deemed this unnecessary for the time being.
The various topics of concern to industrial engineers include management science, financial engineering, engineering management, supply chain management, process engineering, operations research, systemsengineering, ergonomics / safety engineering, cost and value engineering, quality engineering, facilities planning, and the engineering design process. Traditionally, a major aspect of industrial engineering was planning the layouts of factories and designing assembly lines and other manufacturing paradigms. And now, in so-called lean manufacturing systems, industrial engineers work to eliminate wastesof time, money, materials, energy, and other resources.
Examples of where industrial engineering might be used include designing an assembly workstation, strategizing for various operational logistics, consulting as an efficiency expert, developing a new financial algorithm or loan system for a bank, streamlining operation and emergency room location or usage in a hospital, planning complexdistribution schemes for materials or products (referred to as Supply Chain Management), and shortening lines (or queues) at a bank, hospital, or a theme park.
Industrial engineers typically use computer simulation (especially discrete event simulation), along with extensive mathematical tools and modeling and computational methods for system analysis, evaluation, and optimization.
History
Seealso: List of industrial engineers
Efforts to apply science to the design of processes and of production systems were made by many people in the 18th and 19th centuries. They took some time to evolve and to be synthesized into disciplines that we would label with names such as industrial engineering, production engineering, or systems engineering. For example, precursors to industrial engineering...