The Industrial Engineering Department has a longstanding tradition of conducting leading-edge research in all areas of industrial engineering. The research areas of our faculty include: Reliability, Maintainability & Quality Engineering; Transportation, Logistics, & Distribution; Healthcare Systems Engineering; Manufacturing & Automation; Human Factors & Ergonomics; and Engineering Management. A special emphasis of our research has been in the area of quantitative modeling and analysis of transportation and logistics system through our three major research centers (Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution, Center for Innovation in Health Care Logistics, and the Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center).

This synergistic research takes advantage of our unique access to major organizations with world-class logistics and distribution operations. For example, our research has considered changes to business practices in order to simultaneously lower inventories and reduce stock-outs, designing next-generation distribution centers, developing new global identification standards, and optimizing the design of global supply chains to improve their efficiency and resilience to disruption events.