Industrial Engineering & ICT

The SRO IE&ICT is the successor of the SRO e-Productivity. In the latter SRO productivity of various sorts was the main theme, including classical areas like logistics, production and transport and more recent areas like finance and health care. The SRO covered a broad range of topics. Each of the participating groups has contributed significantly to its own field of research. The existing industrial contacts have been strengthened and there has been a very significant growth of the external funding which has led to an important increase of the earning capacity.

The different groups have been successful in getting funding from industry (Thales, NS, Daimler-Chrysler), and national programs such as NWO, STW, Bsik/TRANSUMO and IOP-IPCR.

The new SRO IE&ICT will be organised in multidisciplinary research teams, each team working in one of four selected application domains:

Industrial Engineering is an integral part of many engineering Master’s programs offered at the University of Twente. Parallel to the SRO IE&ICT the initiative IE@UT has been launched which allows students to roam among the supporting Master programs Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Industrial Engineering and Management, Civil Engineering and Management, Industrial Design Engineering.

Research

Industrial Engineering & ICT focuses on the analysis and design of processes in business and society, as well as their optimization, management, and decision support. Currently, performance in Industrial Engineering and ICT often are separately optimized. The increasing size and complexity of systems and resulting vast growth of the ICT environment for data and control communication requires a joint design of both systems and their ICT environment. A better system design leads to lower ICT costs, and a better ICT environment will result in better system performance. The CTIT is well positioned to be a key player in this area. On the one hand, Industrial Engineering is a well established field of research, that is well positioned in application domains including Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Management Science. On the other hand, all groups are related via a common mathematical modeling language. In particular via Operations Research, that is also a key research area within Applied Mathematics. Furthermore, CTIT is well positioned in the area of ICT, in particular also focusing on sensor networks and communications networks. It is the combination of these areas that will be the driving force in IE & ICT.