Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Prerequisites
Prior exposure to probability (6.041 Probabilistic Systems Analysis and Applied Probability or 18.05 Introduction to Probability and Statistics) and optimization, or permission of the instructor.
Objectives
- Describe some important issues in the design and operation of manufacturing systems.
- Explain important measures of system performance.
- Show the importance of random, potentially disruptive events.
- Give some intuition about behavior of these systems.
- Explain the importance of capacity, and how it can vary randomly over time.
- Teach enough mathematics (especially probability) to describe manufacturing systems behavior.
- Show how in-process inventory is sometimes a necessary evil — that is, show the benefits as well as costs.
- Present some practical tools for systems design.
- Describe issues in real-time scheduling, and show why deterministic scheduling is often not adequate.
- Present some simple scheduling rules.
- Describe recent related research.
Textbook
Gershwin, Stanley B. Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. ISBN: 9780135606087.
The Prentice Hall edition of this book is no longer in print. New copies can be obtained from the author. Please see the Manufacturing Systems Engineering website for details.
Grading
Students are required to complete a term project. Details are given on the Projects page. No other assignments are given or graded, although optional homework problems are suggested under Assignments. Class participation is also a component of your grade.
