Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM)

Areas

The Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) R&D Group congregates 108 researchers (54
PhD and 54 MSc), and its focus is on Modelling, Organization and Management of Industrial and
Services Systems, covering:

1. Industrial Systems Design & Management;
2. Supply-chain Logistics and Transportation Systems;
3. Economics and Management of Engineering Systems;
4. Ergonomics and Human Factors.

The first area deals with the design and performance evaluation of industrial and service systems, under agile and lean production environments.
The second deals with supply chain modelling and performance evaluation, supported by simulation and optimization tools, integrating performance indicators, quality engineering and management and business excellence models.

The third focuses on economic and social aspects inherent to strategic decisions on the allocation and use of resources, supported by risk analysis, sustainable innovation, project management. Energyplanning and management has been one field of application using participatory methods for social awareness and involvement.

The fourth focuses on human factors of production systems, dealing with physical risk factors, ergonomics and safety performance, under the health and safety domain.
Multidisciplinary research has been pursued under a systems approach view, within the Group and with different Groups of the Centre, suitable to address Industry 4.0 challenges.

The Group is particularly prone to industrial applications, shown by the funded research projects, but also by the Master dissertation projects in industry, totaling more than 300 in 2013-17.

Impact of CST research

Overall, the impact of IEM research in 2013-17 can be measured using two key ratios:

a) 6 indexed (ISI or Scopus) papers per integrated researcher and year;
b) 26.3 Keuros of non-FCT funded projects per integrated researcher and year.

Three major contributions

1) International activities

The IEM members have a large level of international activities here highlighted:

– MIT-Portugal Program National Director;

– Portuguese representative in TC 7: System Modeling and Optimization of IFIP;

– Research Advisor for UNESCO Center for PBL – Aalborg-Denmark;

– Associate Editors of Indexed ISI/ScImago Q1 Journals Int. Journal of Quality and Reliability
Management and of Energy, of AIMS Energy (Scopus indexed), and other open access Journals;

– Expert Evaluators of research projects – H2020, COST, FP7, ERAMIN, National and foreign Scientific Evaluations;

– JU Members of the S2R – shift2rail – Swi’Tracken consortium;

– Visiting Researchers at AgeLab’s MIT, Harvard University, UKragujevac , USerbia, NUIGalway,
UTwente, ULjubljana, and several other EU and Brazilian Universities;

– Members of CIRP, IFIP WG COVE, EWG on Metaheuristics; EWG on Vehicle Routing and Logistics; WG 7.6@TC 7@IFIP; EWG-ICDSST – Int. Conf. Dec. Support Syst. Technology;
MirLabs;

– Committee members and organizers of International Conferences series: ISC, IC on OR&ES, WOS, AHFE, ICIEOM; ICEE, etc.;

– Best paper awards: of The TQM Journal in 2015; of the European Modeling and Simulation Symposium and of the Operations Research Track (IEOM 2014 Conference);

– IEM members were also invited to participate in 14 juris abroad (career progression and mainly PhD vivas).

2) Funded R&D

The Group captured non-FCT research funds of 2.9MEUR in 2013-2017 (26.3 KEUR per integrated researcher and year). These include European projects like NETEP, FP7_PIRSES-GA-2013-612263 (110KEUR), http://netep.dps.uminho.pt/, 543662-TEMPUS-1-2013-1-ME-TEMPUS-JPHES (80Keuros); competitive national funding: ESGRIS – SAICTPAC/0004/2015; collaborations with industry, such as Cachapuz (88KEUR); applied research under regional program funds for municipalities in the area of transportation systems (240KEUR), and others.
The research work under customization of production systems generated a Spin-off (Gensys).

3)Doctoral Programme

In terms of post-graduate teaching, the IEM coordinates, together with SEOR Research Group the Doctoral Programme in Industrial and Systems Engineering (PDEIS). A total of 38 PhDs were successfully completed, 3 of them with international co-supervision.
The IEM is also involved in two other Doctoral Programmes – Leaders for Technical Industries (LTI) (MIT-Portugal EDAM Programme) and Advanced Engineering Systems for Industry (AESI). One student graduated from LTI with IEM supervision and international co-supervision and, during the current evaluation period (2013-17), an IEM integrated researcher was the LTI Programme Director for 2 years.

Main Publications in 2013-2017

Domingues, P., Sampaio, P., & Arezes, P. M. (2016). Integrated management systems assessment: a maturity model proposal. Journal of Cleaner Production, 124:164-174 (ISI JCR Q1 in Engineering, Environmental; Scimago SJR Q1 in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering; 20
Scopus and 32 Google Scholar citations).
algoritmi.uminho.pt/downloads/IEM-01.pdf

Ribeiro, F., Ferreira, P., & Araújo, M. (2013). Evaluating future scenarios for the power generation sector using a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tool: The Portuguese
case. Energy, 52:126-136 (ISI JCR Q1 in Energy & Fuels; Scimago SJR Q1 in Energy (miscellaneous); 41 Scopus and 62 Google Scholar citations).
algoritmi.uminho.pt/downloads/IEM-02.pdf

IEM Coordinator: Paula Fernanda Varandas Ferreira

IEM Members:

IEM Research Groups:

Recent IEM Publications: