INTEGRATING DESIGN AND PRODUCTION PROBLEM SOLVING IN INDUSTRY-SPONSORED ACADEMIC EDUCATION

摘要

In this paper the authors' experience of teaching an industry sponsored course in Senior Design. The course has been jointly taught by two instructors, one from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the School of Engineering, and the other from the Operations and Information Management Department of the School of Business; and it is part of the Management and Engineering for Manufacturing program at UConn. The student projects have been sponsored by local companies in industries ranging from aerospace to food production. The projects have one main goal: to find the best possible engineering design solution while achieving high production process efficiency. Such an approach relies on the talent of the designer, i.e., the student's or engineer's ability to develop a "perfect product" on one side, and the efficiency of the production solutions on the other. In practice, it is difficult to achieve such combined design process formalization successfully. For this reason, the problem solving relies on students' skills, their knowledge and experience, and the instruction in the course. In particular, the Arena and DELMIA/Quest simulation packages were used for both design and production problem solving. In searching for an ideal solution cost effectiveness and economic constraints were also considered. The experience gained from over ten years teaching of this course is described and analyzed in the paper. Some results of the course are presented and recommendations for further teaching and practice of industry-sponsored courses integrating engineering and production problem solving are discussed.