Collaborative Systems Engineering

The need to adapt to the variable geometry of the global economy in order to generate increasingly personalized products and services, distribute them globally and change and innovate efficiently in the media, as the objectives vary due to the rapid change that takes place worldwide, has led to conceptualize the current company as a multi-organizational network or company-network. The company-network is not a network of companies nor an intra-network organization, but is a flexible organization of economic activity built around specific business projects, carried out by networks of diverse composition and origin. Therefore, the network is the company.

The network forms a new system as a set of interconnected processes, under the responsibility of various organizations. The prevailing vision of intra-company processes evolves towards a reality of inter-company processes. These networks configure complex systems that have the flexibility and adaptability required by a global economy, subject to incessant technological innovation and stimulated by a continuous change in demand.

Theories are in full development to explain the operation of the company-network, which reflects the recent occurrence of this phenomenon, and for that reason there are not yet recognized or standardized behavior patterns, except for the demand for collaboration that the integrated system imposes on its participants. This organizational reality presents multiple opportunities as a line of research in Industrial Engineering, which confronts this phenomenon from a systemic perspective, given its inherent complexity and dynamism. Some of these new concepts will allow modeling and optimizing certain processes of the company-network. On other occasions, it is necessary to resort to structuring methodologies to identify and delimit the novel problematic situations of this reality.

Logistics and Supply Systems

Quantitative methodologies are studied for problems of design, planning and management of supply chains or logistics systems, focused on the generation of goods and services. This includes network design, planning and management of inventories and production, transport and distribution systems, design and management of operations in logistics facilities, among others. The approaches used are based mainly on the use of optimization techniques and mathematical programming.

This discipline seeks to develop decision support systems in the described context, so that professionals in the public or private sector have quantitative and computational tools to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the operation of the logistics systems involved.