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Session 3257

Embedded Control -A New Key Technology and its Possible Effects on Industrial Engineering Curricula

Sencer Yeralan University of Florida

Technological advances have always affected manufacturing, trade, and even national economies. In today's rapidly changing world, industrial engineering must keep a sharp eye on such new technologies. Computer technologies double their performance in about every 12 to 18 months. Accordingly, IE curricula must be reviewed and updated on an almost continuous basis. Such rapid and sustained change places unprecedented demands on curricula development and management. The new challenges being faced include the anticipation of new key technologies for timely preparation of new curricula, determination of the relationship of new technologies to other components of the curricula, faculty development, and course material delivery. At the University of Florida's Industrial Research Laboratory, we have invested several years of work in embedded controls and their applications to autonomous intelligent systems. Through our extensive research, we are convinced that embedded control is a new technology that will have profound effects on the field of industrial engineering. This paper discusses issues related to the emergence of embedded control technologies.

In order to better understand the profound effect of new technologies on industrial engineering and industrial engineering curricula, we must first adopt working definition for industrial engineering: the field of engineering that is concerned with the efficiency, productivity, flexibility, robustness, or in short, the competitiveness of industry. Over the past decade, computer technologies have had the most significant influence over the competitiveness of industry. Although the IE profession has focused more on improving competitiveness through operational methods, the accelerated growth in technologies may soon make it more appropriate for IE to be a technology-driven profession. The introduction of these new technologies has provided many opportunities for a new breed of uniquely qualified IEs.

The influence of computer technologies is not a new phenomenon in IE: Consider the period from the 1960's to the 1980's. It is interesting to observe that the use of computers not only facilitated the solution of analytical models in this era, but also affected the type of analytical models themselves, and solution approaches in a very profound manner. The mainframes were the workhorses for the pre-1980's, mostly running in a batch processing mode. (A program was submitted to the computer as one of many jobs.) This "batch job" paradigm is still visible in the models and methods of IE, and, consequently, many algorithmic procedures still follow the batch-job paradigm. Under this paradigm, the algorithm has a set of inputs. It then goes through a number of well-defined steps.

1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings

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Yeralan, S. (1996, June), Embedded Control A New Key Technology And Its Possible Effects On Industrial Engineering Curricula Paper presented at 1996 Annual Conference, Washington, District of Columbia. 10.18260/1-2--6016