Abstract

DASTKHAN, H.  and  OWLIA, M.S.. Study of trends and perspectives of industrial engineering research. S. Afr. J. Ind. Eng. [online]. 2009, vol.20, n.1, pp.1-12. ISSN 2224-7890.

Industrial engineering is an engineering discipline which, because of its multi-disciplinary nature, has played an important role in the development and optimization of different systems at macro and micro levels. In this paper, the results of a research to study the position and trend of Industrial Engineering research in recent years are described. The data from a sample of 7 114 IE-related articles from international journals during the last 27 years were used for the analysis. The results showed that the development of IE in many countries has a strong correlation with their industrial and economic development. However, IE research topics are spreading in other management and engineering departments and so there is a need to redefine the discipline and its specific areas of interest. According to the prediction made using time series analysis, the most favorite fields of IE research in future will be on subjects related to information technology, intelligent systems, optimization, quality, and supply chain management.

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