All Industrial and Systems Engineering

Industrial and Systems Engineering is a recognized combined engineering discipline, reflected in the many university departments and professional programs that carry exactly this joint name, uniting two closely related branches of engineering that both center on designing and optimizing complex systems rather than a single physical device. Industrial engineering revolves around the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, information, equipment, and energy, drawing on mathematics, physical and social sciences together with engineering analysis to specify, predict, and evaluate the results such systems produce. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their full life cycles, applying systems thinking principles so that an engineered system's individual components work in synergy to perform a useful function. Operations research, the branch of applied mathematics devoted to analytical methods for improving management and decision making, underlies much of the shared analytical toolkit both disciplines draw upon.