The field of Industrial Engineering originated with the Industrial Revolution due to the complexities of mass production. Industrial engineering originally dealt with the optimization of complex production systems with the aim of improving quality and productivity. The ultimate goal was to design factories capable of simultaneously offering product variety, high quality and low costs. Such factories first became a reality in the automobile industry before spreading more broadly.

With the digital revolution came the mass production of semiconductors and its derived technologies including computers, cell phones and the Internet. In the 80s and 90s, a great deal of effort in IE was directed to semiconductor manufacturing, to logistics and to supply chains. With the Internet came the information age, where data became abundant and computer power cheap. In the early part of this century, we saw IE direct its efforts to health care, call centers, and to the design and pricing of product and services including financial engineering, dynamic pricing and revenue optimization. We are now seeing the emergence of new technologies, such as blockchain and machine learning, and a host of new problems in the knowledge economy where growth is dependent on the creative use of information and technology rather than on physical means of production. It is in this new economy that our graduates will launch their careers, and it is our mission to train them so they can successfully do so.

To help our students to succeed in the knowledge economy, a new undergraduate (UG) program in Decision Analytics will be launched in Fall Term 2018. Graduates will learn to analyze data, build and fit models that are consistent with data, develop algorithms, simulate models, and design process and system innovations seeking optimal solutions to important decision problems in domain specific areas. Graduates can work for banks, insurance companies, e-commerce, the travel and leisure industry, health-care organizations, and consulting firms in addition to working on complex issues arising in advanced manufacturing processes that also require decision analytics.

Our existing UG programs (IEEM and LME) will be unified into one program under the name of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. This program will share some of the core courses with Decision Analytics and will benefit from courses that are more in line with the modern economy. Graduates from this program will acquire transferable skills that will enable them to find positions in the logistics and manufacturing sectors, especially focusing on careers related to scheduling, systems design, operations planning, quality management and performance analysis.