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Research Projects

Research Activities

The Industrial Engineering Department has a longstanding tradition of conducting leading-edge research in all areas of industrial engineering. The research areas of our faculty include: Reliability, Maintainability & Quality Engineering; Transportation, Logistics, & Distribution; Healthcare Systems Engineering; Manufacturing & Automation; Human Factors & Ergonomics; and Engineering Management. A special emphasis of our research has been in the area of quantitative modeling and analysis of transportation and logistics system through our three major research centers (Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution, Center for Innovation in Health Care Logistics, and the Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center). This synergistic research takes advantage of our unique access to major organizations with world-class logistics and distribution operations. For example, our research has considered changes to business practices in order to simultaneously lower inventories and reduce stock-outs, designing next-generation distribution centers, developing new global identification standards, and optimizing the design of global supply chains to improve their efficiency and resilience to disruption events.

Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution

CELDi is an applied research and education consortium consisting of:

• Nine major research universities;
• More than 30 member organizations from commercial, military and government sectors of the economy;
• The National Science Foundation (NSF I/UCRC)

Center for Innovation in Health Care Logistics

The Center for Innovation in Health Care Logistics (CIHL) is an industry-university partnership that leads a nationwide effort to identify and foster systemwide adoption of ground-breaking healthcare supply chain and logistic innovations.

Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center

The Mack-Blackwell Transportation Center is also a member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Transportation Security Center of Excellence (TSCOE) and is developing a comprehensive research, education, and training program to support ongoing and future efforts of DHS. The focus of the TSCOE is the security of the intermodal transportation systems of the United States at the local, state, and national levels.