Mission Statement

 

Our mission is to develop methodologies and enhance existing methodologies that will assist in the development, manufacture, and distribution of new products. Using distributed information systems, such as the Internet, these methodologies will permit engineers to collaborate virtually anywhere in the world. Our research interest areas include supply chain management (SCM), collaborative product development (CPD), and distributed information systems (DIS).

Supply Chain Management: We have developed network based models to investigate supply chain operational performance and to address issues such as supplier selection, uncertainty and supply chain disruptions. In the area of supply chain risk management, we have been conducting research to assesss the vulnerability of supply chain systems.

Collaborative Product Development: One important aspect of CPD is the effective decision support framework, which helps collaborating engineers develop products quickly and cost-effectively. Our focus is to develop a “Virtual Product Development Environment,” which provides solutions to (a) how should a company select partners to perform the constituent responsibilities of a business initiative? (b) what is a suitable methodology to analyze conflicts among engineers? (c) what is an appropriate mechanism for engineers to converge to an agreeable design?

Distributed Information Systems: The difficulties of DIS are increased due the issues of intra- and inter- enterprise communication, system heterogeneity, information security, different engineering data formats and database formats. Our focus is to design and implement a DIS to address these difficulties. The system will provide an “information pipeline” that supports the sharing of information, specifically, in the context of collaborative product development. The system will be based heavily on industry standards to provide an open and evolvable environment that will flow with, as well as contribute to, commercial best practices and trends.

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