Rethink IE

Now is the perfect time for the Purdue School of Industrial Engineering (IE) to share its vision with our alumni, industry partners, academic colleagues and friends.

The world, as we know, is evolving at a rate that most of us can hardly keep up with. The line between products and services has blurred to a point where we can no longer consider one without the other. And ever-changing technology is forcing us not only to rethink how we do business but also to reinvent the very businesses themselves.

Since its founding in 1955, Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering has played a critical role in the history of the industrial engineering profession. From fostering the development of computer simulation methodology to intelligent manufacturing, we have been revolutionizing IE all along. The time has come to “Rethink IE.”

What role will future industrial engineers play in sustaining the environment, delivering cleaner energy and improving health care? How can we bring food and clean water to every corner of the world? Where do we fit into the changing needs of security and urban infrastructure?

At Purdue, we are leading the way. Key scientific advances in several critical areas are enabling us to address these problems, with particular focus in the following areas:

• Cognition and Decision Making: Researchers are beginning to better understand the human brain. Reconciling normative, behavioral and neurophysiological bases of human decision making will allow us to design effective socio-technical systems.
• Next Generation Products and Services: Breakthroughs in bio- and nanosciences allow us now to use even the tiniest of building blocks, creating structures one atom at a time. Industrial engineers are ideally suited to optimizing these discoveries by scaling up processes — from atoms to devices to enterprises — in order to manufacture radically new products economically.
• Computational IE: Opportunity lies at the intersection of algorithms, data and networks. Where we once built algorithms optimized for a single processor, we will soon design algorithms that work on millions of processors simultaneously.
• Complex Systems and Networks: As systems-focused engineers, we are in an ideal place to solve the complex systems grand challenges facing our globally interconnected society.

At Purdue IE, we take great pride in our role as pioneers and leaders, mapping the way for new systems, capabilities and organization and rethinking the future of industrial engineering.