TITLE: PRODUCTION SYSTEMS ENGINEERING: Problems, Solutions, and Applications

SPEAKER: Professor S.M. Meerkov

ABSTRACT:

Production Systems Engineering (PSE) is an emerging branch of Engineering intended to uncover fundamental principles that govern production systems and utilize them for the purposes of analysis, continuous improvement, and design. In PSE, the machines are assumed to be unreliable and the buffers are finite. Under these assumptions, production lines are nonlinear stochastic systems. The study of their statics and dynamics is the goal of PSE. In this talk, the main problems of PSE and their solutions will be described along with several applications. In addition, the so-called PSE Toolbox, which implements the methods and algorithms developed, will be discussed. A demo of the toolbox can be found at http://www.ProductionSystemsEngineering.com

BIO: Semyon M. Meerkov received his MSEE degree from the Polytechnic of Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1962 and Ph.D. in Systems Science from the Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow, Russia, in 1966. He was with the Institute of Control Sciences until 1977. From 1979 to 1984 he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL. Since 1984 he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. He has held visiting positions at UCLA (1978-1979), Stanford (1991), Technion, Israel (1997-1998 and 2008) and Tsinghua, China (2008). He was the Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Department Editor for Manufacturing Systems of IIE Transactions and Associate Editor of several other journals. His research interests are in Systems and Control with applications to Production Systems, Communication Networks, and Theory of Rational Behavior.