Engineering Systems Division
The academic year 2002–2003 was one of significant accomplishment for the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) as we continued to move forward toward our goals of defining and evolving engineering systems as a new field of study; transforming engineering education and practice; bringing the ESD academic programs and research centers together into one location; and building a high-performance administrative structure that will support the division.
In April, ESD acting director Professor Daniel Hastings was appointed codirector. Professor Hastings holds a dual appointment in Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems. He has taught courses and seminars in plasma physics, rocket propulsion, advanced space power and propulsion systems, aerospace policy, and space systems engineering. Professor Hastings' recent research has concentrated on issues of space systems and space policy, and has also focused on issues related to spacecraft-environmental interactions, space propulsion, space systems engineering, and space policy. He served as chief scientist of the Air Force from 1997 to 1999 and in the past fiscal year was nominated to the National Science Board and was honored with the AIAA's Losey Award for "significant achievements in space plasma interactions with space systems and for astute leadership in USAF aerospace programs."
The ESD faculty continued to expand. We are delighted to announce that the following have joined our faculty and teaching staff:
Daniel D. Frey, PhD, received a dual appointment in 2003 as assistant professor of mechanical engineering and engineering systems. Professor Frey's research concerns robust design of engineering systems. To advance the theory and practice of robust design, he is working to understand the complementary role of experiments and simulations in systems engineering. Professor Frey's honors include the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Teaching Award, received in 2000; the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching at MIT, received in 1999; the R&D 100 Award, received in 1997 (awarded by R&D magazine) and the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his service in the armed forces in 1991.
David Mindell, PhD, Frances and David Dibner associate professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing (STS) and MacVicar Fellow, received a dual appointment as associate professor of engineering systems in 2003. He was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow and a fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Professor Mindell's research interests include technology policy (historical and current), the history of automation in the military, the history of electronics and computing, and deep-sea archaeology. He heads MIT's "DeepArch" research group in Deep Sea archaeology. He is the author of War, Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (2000), and Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (2002). He is currently developing acoustic navigation and profiling technologies for high precision robotic mapping of underwater sites and is also working on a book on the history of systems engineering, guidance, and computing in the Apollo program in the 1960s.
David R. Wallace, PhD, received a joint appointment in 2003 as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems. He is also Esther and Harold E. Edgerton associate professor and codirector, MIT CADlab. His research interests include environmentally-conscious product design, integrated computer-aided design, industrial design and aesthetics, and product design and new media education. His teaching interests are in the areas of product design, industrial design, environmentally-conscious design and visual communication. He has received a number of awards, including the ASME International Design Engineering Division, Design for Manufacturing Committee IBM Best Paper Award for "Integrating Environmental Impact Assessment into Product Design.
In academic year 2002-2003, Brian Zuckerman continued as the ESD postdoctoral associate. Dr. Zuckerman's work this year involved facilitating and coordinating work with Sandia National Laboratories on ESD's Homeland Security Initiative. In addition, his work contributed to presentations of the research initiative to officials at National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as a proposal to NSF. Dr. Zuckerman also taught the cost-benefit analysis module of ESD.72 Engineering Risk-Benefit Analysis. He worked with faculty in ESD to redesign the module, incorporating a greater emphasis on applying cost-benefit analysis concepts to practical problems through the use of a case study approach.
Currently, there are 43 ESD faculty appointed: 36 in engineering and 7 in management. There are 4 teaching staff members.
As a division, ESD establishes an intellectual home for key programs and centers, engages faculty across departments and disciplines, and fosters discourse about engineering innovation, all oriented around the issues of engineering systems. The division coordinates academic programs with some 300 graduate students. We are happy to announce that the MIT faculty approved the Engineering Systems PhD and Engineering Systems Masters programs, which were formally initiated this year. Four students have been admitted to the ESD PhD for fall, 2004 and three for the ESD SM. In addition, eight students were admitted as the last TMP class.
In addition to the ESD SM, masters level programs include Leaders for Manufacturing, the Master in Logistics, System Design and Management, and Technology and Policy. A PhD is offered in Engineering Systems. Pre-existing PhD programs in Transportation and in Technology, Management, and Policy are currently being integrated into the ESD PhD program.
ESD has four affiliated research centers: the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development; the Center for Transportation Studies and Logistics; the Industrial Performance Center; and the Center for Innovation in Product Development. These are described later in this report.
Ongoing Initiatives
Engineering Systems Learning Center
The Engineering Systems Learning Center (ESLC), which was established in the 2000-2001 academic year, continued in its service of the larger ESD mission—advancing the field of Engineering Systems and helping to transform engineering education.
Executive director, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld has been working with Professor John Williams, ESLC staff member Betty Barrett, and many others in launching the electronic delivery system. There is now a working web site dedicated to the exchange and utilization of learning materials by instructors—at MIT, in other universities and in industry.
Strong interest has been expressed by additional "communities of practice" for similar exchanges, including a set of universities linked to MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative and others. The ESLC is partnering with Cambridge University in cosponsoring a conference on legal issues in e-learning, which will be in Cambridge, England, on September 16th.
Work has been completed on the first round of the Sloan Foundation grant, with Richard de Neufville and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld as co-PIs. The focus was on the development and delivery of what are being termed "Industry Engineering Systems Studies" for the auto, pharmaceutical, airline and aerospace industries. The resulting products will be accessible on-line through the Engineering Systems Learning Center.
Engineering Systems Knowledge Network
A number of ESD faculty and staff are involved in activities of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI). In particular, the CMI Professional Practice Program (PPP), directed by Daniel Roos on the MIT side, has a number of initiatives with strong links to ESD. The CMI PPP represents a portfolio of educational offerings targeted at graduate students and practitioners. Many are modeled after existing MIT programs, such as the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) called the Cambridge Technology Policy (TP). With a collaboration that began in summer, 2000, TP is the most advanced of the PPP efforts.
Other ESD faculty are involved in joint curriculum development with Cambridge University colleagues to create case studies and other educational materials, and to develop modules, executive education, lifelong learning courses, and other degree programs, including a program modeled on MIT's Master of Engineering in Environmental Engineering. These activities complement the mission of the ESD Engineering Systems Learning Center (ESLC), and many synergies are beginning to be explored. The ESLC is well situated to serve as a central repository and sharing mechanism for a wealth of case studies and curriculum materials developed by CMI funded efforts in addition to the existing ESD efforts. ESLC is coordinating its efforts with other work at MIT on electronic storage namely D-Space, Sloan space etc.
Engineering Systems Symposium Committee
The major effort by the committee this year was on preparing for an international symposium to be held at MIT in March 2004. Six subcommittees were formed and made presentations at the ESD offsite in June. These subcommittees dealt with system architecture and complexity; flexibility, uncertainty and risk; safety and security; sustainability and sustainment; enterprise level issues of Engineering Systems; and context in which Systems function. A preliminary agenda has been laid out and a preliminary meeting of some thought leaders has been scheduled for October. The ESD Spring Offsite was devoted to preparing for the international symposium.
Faculty Notes
Professor George Apostolakis gave the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the European Safety and Reliability Association in Maastricht, The Netherlands, on June 16, 2003. The title of his speech was "Risk-Informed Decision Making." He was also appointed to the Senior Advisory Panel of the "Living with Risk" project that is sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (Washington, DC) and the Center for Global Security Research (Livermore, CA). This project aims to enhance the decision-making capabilities of high-level decision makers in the presence of the uncertainties associated with complex emergencies, such as those resulting from terrorist threats.
Professor Cynthia Barnhart, codirector of MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics, was a member of the second place team in the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Professor Joel P. Clark was named codirector of a new collaborative research lab at MIT, the GM-MIT Materials and Manufacturing Systems Analysis Collaborative Research Laboratory.
Dr. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld was elected to a three-year term on the National Executive Board of the Industrial Relations Research Association.
Professors Richard de Neufville and Professor Amedeo Odoni, published a new book on the planning, design and management of airport systems. Released by McGraw-Hill Professional, its title is Airport Systems: Planning, Design, and Management. De Neufville, along with ESD Professor Sheila Widnall, was named to the Massachusetts Port Authority advisory council to explore the use of new security technologies.
Professor Thomas W. Eagar, the Thomas Lord professor of materials engineering and engineering systems, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for "advances in welding and joining of metals, ceramics and electronic materials, alternate manufacturing processes, and for leadership in curriculum review and teaching." Eagar also spoke before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on the environment, technology, and standards on June 5, 2003.
Professor Daniel Hastings was honored with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Losey Award for "significant achievements in space plasma interactions with space systems and for astute leadership in USAF aerospace programs." He was also nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to the National Science Board. He was chosen by the secretary of the Air Force to be the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board for a three-year term.
Professor Nancy Leveson and students, Kathryn Anne Weiss and Elwin C. Ong, received the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on System Engineering (INCOSE) for their paper, "Reusable Specification Components for Model-Driven Development." In addition, a paper on safety analysis of pilot-automation interaction by Professor Leveson and postdoctoral student Ed Bachelder was selected by the SAE as one of the best aerospace research papers of 2001. "Describing and Probing Complex System Behavior: A Graphical Approach" will be reprinted in a special issue of the SAE Transactions on Aerospace Systems.
Research on the aerospace workforce by MIT's Labor Aerospace Research Agenda (LARA), coled by Professor Thomas Kochan and Dr. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, was featured in the Final Report of the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, which was issued on November 18, 2002. The report, entitled "Anyone, Anything, Anywhere, Anytime" offers nine core recommendations as part of an urgent call for the revitalization of the US Aerospace Industry.
Professor Seth Lloyd was featured in the January 4, 2002 edition of the New York Times, along with other leading scientists, writers and futurists on the advice they would give President Bush on identifying and addressing the pressing scientific issues for our nation and the world.
Prof David Mindell's book "Between Human and Machine" was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Professor Stuart Madnick won the Best Paper award at the primary conference for technology-oriented IT faculty, the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS). His winning paper, coauthored with Aykut Firat and Benjamin Grosof, is entitled "Financial Information Integration in the Presence of Equational Ontological Conflicts."
Professor Yossi Sheffi organized two large conferences on supply chain and uncertainly, supported by CMI. One was held on December 5 at MIT, the other on June 19 in the United Kingdom.
Shoji Shiba, a visiting professor in MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing program, was awarded the Deming Prize for Individuals. Professor Shiba received the award for his work in globalizing TQM through his research; introducing TQM to industry in Hungary and the United States; and, "for integrating social sciences and international business, providing an "out-of-the-box'" contrast to the homogeneous thinking of most Japanese quality practitioners."
David Simchi-Levi was appointed editor-in-chief of Naval Research Logistics starting July 2003. The journal, which was founded in 1954, has had a distinguished history, with the publication of seminal work that has made an impact both on the theory and practice of finance, operations research and statistics.
Professor Joseph Sussman's text, Introduction to Transportation Systems, published in 2000, is in its third year of availability. It has a strong record of adoption in transportation engineering, transportation planning, and business logistics programs. Of interest is its international recognition: the book is in use at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Sydney (Australia), Malaysian University of Science and Technology and The National University of Singapore. A Greek version of his text has been recently completed and is now in use in Greece. A version for the Taiwan market is in process and discussions in Mexico for a Spanish version are underway. Professor Sussman was the keynote speaker in November 2002 at the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies' 15th anniversary. Professor Sussman's student, Ralph Hall a Technology, Management and Policy PhD candidate in MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, was awarded the prestigious Wootan Memorial Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) for his research in the area of transportation policy and planning. Professor Sussman was Hall's thesis advisor.
Dr. Daniel E. Whitney, an ESD senior lecturer in and a senior research scientist in the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development, was named an IEEE Fellow. He also received the silver Infinite Mile Award for Institutional Bridging, celebrating his achievements in spearheading successful collaborations with students, faculty, and staff; companies and organizations; and different departments within MIT.
Institute Professor Sheila E. Widnall was appointed to NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She was among 12 women who will be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in October 2003 and was also named one of Discover magazine's 50 most important women in science. Widnall, along with Richard de Neufville, was named to the Massachusetts Port Authority advisory council to explore the use of new security technologies.
Professor John Williams received an Employee Recognition Award from Sandia National Laboratory for over 10 years work as part of a Sandia team on the project Direct Simulation of Near-Wellbore Mechanics designed to improve oil production. The work has been to understand the phenomena involved by building Discrete Element models of the near-wellbore region.
Alumni honors
Alumna Joan Walker, a graduate of MIT's doctoral program in transportation systems, has been awarded the 2001 Eric Pas Dissertation Prize for Travel Behavior Research. This is the second time Walker's dissertation has been honored. She also received first prize for her work in 2001 from the Transportation Science Section of the Institute for Operations and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Program Staff
MIT alumnus Christopher Caplice (PhD'96, Transportation and Logistics Systems) was appointed the new director of MIT's of Engineering in Logistics program.
Research Staff
On June 18, Dr. Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, was named one of 20 finalists in the New England Business & Technology Association's "New England Business and Technology Awards" program at its 2003 Technology-Enabled Business Summit. Earlier in the year, Dr. Coughlin gave the American Telemedicine Association's (ATA) first Kenneth Bird Annual Lecture in Orlando, Florida and was also honored with a Telly Award for his research and presentation of One in Four: Strategic Business Innovation for a Global, Aging Market.
Administrative Staff
Jon Griffith, LFM-SDM's director of partner relations and administration and Beverly Kozol-Tattlebaum, administrative assistant for the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) office, were honored on April 11, 2002 with the 2nd Annual Infinite Mile Award. Griffith received the bronze Infinite Mile Award for Excellence, which honors those whose work is of the highest caliber, dedication, and enthusiasm. Kozol-Tattlebaum was given the gold Infinite Mile Award for Excellence for consistently supporting the ESD office and its functions at a highly professional level with a "can-do" attitude and an effective problem-solving ability.
Abe Dane joined ESD as faculty liaison for ESD and OpenCourseWare.
Major Meetings
TPP Theme of the Year—Global and Homeland Security: Science, Technology, and the Role of the University
The Annual Symposium was held on May 2, 200, hosted by TPP and cosponsored by TPP, ESD, the President's and Provost's offices, the Sloan Foundation, the Center for International Studies, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Keynote speaker was John H. Marburger III, science advisor to President Bush and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President Charles Vest and Harvard University Professor Lewis M. Branscomb were among the major presenters.
Speakers in this TPP Theme of the Year series included:
B. John Garrick, consultant and chairman, Committee on Combating Terrorism, National Academy of Engineering on "Combating the Risk of Terrorism: Making the Right Decisions".
Rae Zimmerman director of the NSF-funded Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a former president of the Society for Risk Analysis, on "Building Resilient Infrastructure to Combat Terrorism."
Major Speakers
Lewis M. Branscomb, cochair of the National Research Council's Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism, spoke at the second annual Brunel Lecture Series on Complex Systems. The title of his presentation was on "Living with Catastrophic Terrorism." The event was sponsored by ESD.
Patrick Jaillet, head of MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, made a presentation entitled A CEE Department for MIT for the 21st Century on April 14, 2003, at the second annual Charles L. Miller Lecture. The event, sponsored jointly by CEE and MIT's Engineering Systems Division, honored the late Civil Engineering department head, who served in the 1960s.
Professor William B. Rouse, (MIT '72), head of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). Professor Rouse addressed the ESD faculty on April 22, 2003, with a presentation entitled "Perspectives on Industrial & Systems Engineering: A Portfolio of Systems Initiatives"
More information on the Engineering Systems Division can be found on the web at http://esd.mit.edu/.
Leaders for Manufacturing
The Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) program is a partnership between MIT and over 25 global manufacturing firms to discover and translate into teaching and practice principles that produce world-class manufacturing and manufacturing leaders. This partnership is motivated by our shared belief that excellence in manufacturing is critical to meeting the economic and social needs of individuals, firms, and society, and that the health of companies operating in global markets is essential to society's well-being.
Now in its 15th year of operation, LFM is a partnership between the School of Engineering, the Sloan School of Management and leading manufacturers. Launched in 1988 with significant industry funding, the program emphasizes collaboration and knowledge sharing with its partner companies across the entire spectrum of "Big-M" manufacturing enterprise issues. LFM supports students as fellows in the program (with fully-paid tuition). The largest component of the educational efforts is the Fellows Program, a 24-month dual master's degree (SM in engineering and MBA or SM in management) experience, involving a single integrative research project carried out on site in partner firms.
Relocation
New in FY2003 has been a move to institutionalize the System Design and Management (SDM) program by moving it, along with its partner program, LFM, under the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) umbrella. The first step in this integration was a move of LFM and SDM from the fourth to the third floor in E40 in spring 2003 where LFM-SDM shares space with the other ESD academic programs, the Masters of Engineering in Logistics Program and the Technology and Policy Program. Further synergies will be sought in FY2004 including a review of the ESD staffing structure as a way to reduce overall staff headcount and administrative reporting for both LFM and SDM through ESD. The assumption of Institute oversight by ESD should benefit SDM immediately by assuring faculty resources for the core SDM courses offered by ESD.
Academic Program
Forty-eight students in the class of 2003 completed the Fellows program and approximately 80 percent have taken positions in manufacturing firms. Each of the 48 graduates completed an internship at a partner company during the summer and fall of 2002. Internships are focused projects of concern to the partners, accomplished by interns with company support and MIT faculty guidance. Representative projects this past year included the use of modeling and critical operations data to optimize plant performance, applying lean manufacturing techniques for the design of an aircraft assembly line, and supply chain performance through forecasting.
Another 57 students (class of 2004) completed their first year of on-campus studies and are starting their six-month internships. Forty-eight new students (class of 2005) were admitted and have begun an intensive summer session. The class of 2005 has an average of 4.8 years of work experience. Don Rosenfield continues to serve as the director of the LFM Fellows Programs. Codirectors for the program were Paul Lagace, Bill Hanson, and Steve Eppinger.
Research and Knowledge Transfer Program
As part of LFM and SDM's commitment to lifelong learning, an initiative begun in FY2002 was continued to encourage LFM and SDM alumni to stay connected with MIT by sharing relevant information. Paul Gallagher, research associate for LFM and SDM, scheduled monthly web casts presented by MIT faculty and various LFM and SDM alumni. The content of each webcast, also called "webinars", provides valuable information on the latest trends, cutting-edge developments and innovative strategies, all of which pertain to manufacturing and/or systems design. The presentations are given in real time, via the Internet and telephone, which allowed participants to follow along visually and audibly as well as ask questions.
Alumni continue to express a high degree of interest in these virtual knowledge-sharing events, and webinars have evolved into a key strategy for alumni engagement. Statistics for FY2003 are below:
Approximate total connections: | 334 |
Estimated total viewers: | 580 |
Unique individuals who attended: | 224 |
Unique alumni who attended: | 177 (23% of total alumni base) |
Outreach
LFM continues its leadership role in the National Coalition of Manufacturing Leadership (NCML), a partnership of 15 universities with joint management and engineering manufacturing programs. The NCML met at Loyola Marymount University in November 2002. In attendance were several universities in various stages of starting joint management and engineering manufacturing programs, including Loyola Marymount, University of Texas Pan American, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of California at Los Angeles, and University of California at San Diego. A key objective of the NCML is to serve as a resource for new joint programs, and it was gratifying to see that the concept begun at LFM of a "bilingual" (management/engineering) education in manufacturing leadership continues to spawn new programs that can be used to meet the need for global manufacturing leaders.
Placement
LFM students, sponsored and non-sponsored, continue to be highly sought once they have completed the program. Partner companies as well as other organizations take a special interest in LFM students as proven by their commitment to speak to the class on various issues during the Pro Seminar session. About 80 percent of each class accepts positions within the manufacturing industry while the percentage of students accepting positions within partner companies has remained at about 50 percent.
More information about the Leaders for Manufacturing Program can be found on the web at http://lfm.mit.edu/.
System Design and Management
The mission of the System Design and Management (SDM) program is to educate future technical leaders in architecture, engineering, and designing complex products and systems, preparing them for careers as the technically grounded senior managers of their enterprises. SDM intends to set the standards for delivering career-compatible professional education using advanced information and communication technologies. SDM was one of MIT's early entries into the field of distance education and remains the only degree-granting program at MIT that can be earned primarily from a remote location.
The SDM program is a joint offering of the School of Engineering and the Sloan School of Management, leading to a Master of Science degree in engineering and management. Targeted for professional engineers with three or more years of experience, the program centers on a 13-course curriculum in systems, engineering, and management, including a project-based thesis. It offers three curricular options: a 13-month in-residence format; a 24-month distance education for company-sponsored students, requiring one academic semester in residence at MIT; and a 24-month on-campus program for self-supporting students who can obtain a research assistantship in one of MIT's labs or centers. The program was conceived as an alternative to the MBA for professional engineers, allowing working professionals to pursue a degree without interrupting their careers and relocating themselves and their families.
Denny Mahoney, director of the SDM Fellows Program, completed his fourth year in that position. Codirectors for the program were Paul Lagace, Bill Hanson, and Steve Eppinger.
Student Statistics
In January 2003, SDM admitted its fifth class, enrolling 36 students. As was done in FY02, in May 2003 SDM put on an informational evening for local MIT alumni and others interested in SDM as a way to recruit prospective students for SDM 04. This successful event brought in more than 30 prospective students to campus where they heard presentations from several faculty, students, and alumni about the program.
System Design and Management Admissions Statistics
1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | |
Admitted | 35 | 58 | 47 | 50 | 37 | 27 | 36 |
On-Campus | 8 | 16 | 6 | 14 | 8 | 7 | 18 |
Self-Supported | 3 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 6 |
Research Assistant | 3 | 12 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 10 |
Distance Education | 27 | 42 | 41 | 36 | 29 | 18 | 17 |
Company-Sponsored | 29 | 45 | 43 | 41 | 32 | 25 | 20 |
MIT-UTC System Engineering Project
This past year, SDM and its partner program, Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM), along with United Technologies Corporation (UTC), continued with a second full year of the MIT-UTC System Engineering Project. UTC has identified 11 core capabilities that the corporation believes must be strengthened across all the business units for UTC to remain competitive in the next century. For each capability, UTC partnered with a university that can deliver the highest quality education to its workforce in each of these areas, with LFM-SDM serving as its partner for one of these competencies—Systems Engineering.
The project team has segmented the educational process into three target populations—a group of experts enrolled in the SDM program, a second group of experts enrolled in UTC-MIT's Systems Engineering Certificate Program, and the managers/facilitators of those experts. The two-year pilot has been very successful, with 29 students completing the certificate program and 75 managers/supervisors completing the six days of content in the Manager/Supervisor Workshop. Because of the success of the program, the effort has been extended for a third year. The next cohort of certificate students for FY2004 is expected to reach 30 with 27 students from UTC and three students from a second company, ArvinMeritor, joining the program.
Distance Education Delivery
As MIT's premier degree program offered at a distance, SDM has recognized its leadership role at the Institute regarding the practice of distance education and continues to evaluate its delivery with the goal of increasing the quality of the remote-learning experience while reducing costs, both for MIT and for sponsoring companies. The purchase of the videoconference bridge by AMPS in FY2002 provided financial benefits for our companies in FY2003. Additional cost reductions for companies has occurred as more distance sites have shifted from ISDN protocols to IP, which is operated over the Internet, thus bringing long-distance connection charges to zero for more sites.
More information about the System Design and Management Program can be found on the web at http://sdm.mit.edu/.
Technology, Management, and Policy
The Technology, Management, and Policy Program (TMP) is an interdisciplinary PhD program directed at producing world-class researchers striving to improve methods used in defining and implementing policies for the intelligent use of technology. The program was established in 1992 and became a part of the Engineering Systems Division in 1998. This year, the TMP PhD was made a track in the ESD PhD. All new students interested in a technology and policy PhD will do it through the ESD PhD. All current students are grandfathered.
Students within the TMP are motivated by their recognition of specific problems at the boundaries between technological development and social and industrial policy. TMP's goal is to supply an academically rigorous environment within which these students, under the guidance of MIT faculty, work to extend the nature and purview of the tools needed to understand and address these issues.
The common vision of the program participants is that a dual competency in a technical area and in management and policy is the basis for the effective design of large-scale systems. Research efforts within the program are leading to the development of a new paradigm for the planning and design of engineering systems—a paradigm that blends technical expertise with competence in economics, management, and policy to achieve a better adaptation of technology to societal goals.
Students are rarely directly admitted to the program; rather, they are first admitted to the Master's program in Technology and Policy. After their arrival at MIT, these potential TMP students then prepare a case for admission to the TMP program, which requires that they: construct an appropriate research question; assemble a cadre of MIT faculty committed to that effort; and develop a proposed curriculum that will assure that the student will be equipped to address this question in a manner consistent with the highest academic standards of the fields represented. This admission case is then reviewed by the TMP admissions committee, composed of faculty drawn from the MIT Schools of Engineering; Management; and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
Although the majority of students in the program initially came to TPP solely for the SM in Technology and Policy, many pursue a simultaneous second SM or doctorate in another discipline. There has also been an upsurge in applicants who have specifically targeted admission to TMP over the past several years. The program generally admits about six students annually, but eight students were admitted to TMP last year, and six this past year. Students take approximately five years to complete their degrees and there currently are 23 students enrolled in TMP. Four TMP PhDs were awarded during the 2002–2003 year and these graduates have joined their 30 colleagues in careers in industry, academia and the government.
Marvin and Joanne Grossman have made funding available to help doctoral students travel to exchange ideas with doctoral students in programs with a similar mission to TMP's. Last year, two students traveled to the 1st International Doctoral Consortium in Delft, The Netherlands, where they gave papers and interacted with students from other programs. This year, TMP sent five students to the 2nd Doctoral Consortium, held in Washington, DC. In addition, three students were sent to give papers at the Technology, Policy and Innovation conference in Monterey. We look forward to using this funding to help our students to exchange information with other students, who have similar goals and interests.
More information about the Technology, Management, and Policy Program can be found on the web at http://mit.edu/tpp/www/.
Technology and Policy Program
The Technology and Policy Program (TPP) provides an integrative education to scientists and engineers who wish to lead in the development and implementation of responsible strategies and policies for exploitation of technology for the benefit of their communities. TPP's guiding vision is the education of "Leaders Who Are Engineers and Scientists."
The TPP graduate educational program in the School of Engineering acknowledges that the development of the skills necessary for effective implementation of technology tie into the emerging engineering systems educational thrusts. Consequently, TPP is part of MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD). The program focuses on providing a high impact, high quality education to its students. Its goal is to make TPP the most prestigious and sought after technology policy program in the world and to produce the technological decision makers of the future.
TPP sponsors both a Master of Science program and the Technology, Management, and Policy (TMP) doctoral program. TPP receives most of its applications from outside MIT, but also has several internal admits each year, with many students pursuing a masters or doctoral degree in another program concurrent with their TPP SM degree. Each entering class is around 45 students, with approximately, 35 percent of the students pursuing dual degrees, which may require an additional semester or two to complete. This year, 41 students graduated with Masters degrees in Technology and Policy and 6 Masters students were accepted to continue their studies at the doctoral level. This year's "Best Thesis in Technology and Policy" was awarded jointly to Christine Ng and Erica Fuchs, who are both continuing for the PhDs.
One-semester fellowship funding was provided to several incoming students, in order to attract the top TPP candidates to MIT. This funding, which includes the Rabinowitz and de Neufville funds, has been provided by TPP alumni and donors, who also make possible several other student benefits, including funding for TPP women, and some of the costs associated with the TPP visiting speaker series. In addition, the Keill fellowship provides tuition-only funding.
The TPP greatly values practical experience and actively encourages students to take summer internships between their first and second years of study. In January 2003, 18 students traveled to Washington, DC to attend meetings with prospective internship employers, including government agencies, such as OMB, DOT, and the EPA, and private consulting companies and think tanks such as ICF and CSIS. Partly as a result, many of our students found internships in Washington this summer. Students whose internships were unfunded were able to take advantage of funding provided by TPP alumni and donors, including Larry Linden, Phillip Ng, and Donald Cooke, in order to make their internship experiences possible.
This past year, the reformatted ESD.10 Introduction to Technology and Policy course, was team-taught for a second year by Professors Sussman, Hastings, Field, Oye, and others. Additional fine-tuning will be possible for next year, through the availability of curriculum development funds from the Lord Foundation, which also supports other course changes at TPP. Professor Oye was awarded a Faculty Appreciation Award by the TPP students, for his work in ESD.10 and in the 17.950 Science, Technology, and Policy course, required for second-year SM students.
TPP has continued to work with the Cambridge-MIT Initiative, and several faculty members traveled to Cambridge University this past year to participate in teaching several new courses. Cambridge University admitted full-time students to its 9-month Technology and Policy program for the first time this past fall. Both last year and this, TPP has sent two students to Cambridge for summer internships to support the new curriculum there. Three Cambridge students are currently at MIT pursuing summer internships in research.
The third annual TPP Symposium was held in May this year, and the topic was Global and Homeland Security. This event was well attended by TPP students and faculty, as well as other MIT and non-MIT participants. The two previous symposium topics were Sustainable Mobility: Global Challenges for the 21st Century and a 25th anniversary retrospective of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.
This past spring semester, TPP moved to the 3rd floor of E40, the Muckley building, which has allowed the program to provide better space and support for Technology and Policy students. Also, as of July 1, 2003, TPP has a new director, Professor Dava Newman, who is also an alumna of the program.
More information about Technology and Policy Program can be found on the web at http://mit.edu/tpp/www/.
Center for Innovation in Product Development
The Center for Innovation in Product Development (CIPD) unites industry practitioners with leading academic researchers to investigate the end-to-end product development process. A joint effort between MIT's School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management, CIPD researches the process of product development (PD) from engineering concept to management practice; from product design to market delivery and beyond.
The internet will be key to product development's future. New products will be developed by just-in-time collaborations of globally-distributed teams linked seamlessly by web-based tools and processes. These collaborations will evolve through an emerging services marketplace, where lead firms will find the world's best suppliers of information, components, and support services. Focusing on web-based methods, CIPD works with engineers and managers in real-world PD environments to extend the fundamental knowledge of the PD process, and provide innovative improvements to current practice.
CIPD was founded in 1996 as a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC). Since inception, the Center has executed nearly 200 research projects, and produced nearly 150 refereed journal articles and 100 conference papers. Our faculty has received over 20 awards for outstanding research, and our work has led to the creation of a dozen spin-off companies. In AY2003, CIPD's 16 faculty and 21 graduate students pursued product development research with a budget of $1 million. Under the guidance of center director Chris Magee and assistant director Nils Nordal, CIPD continues to advance the theory and practice of product development with research programs focusing on complex systems.
Research Programs
CIPD investigates specific problems with immediate relevance to industry. As a research center focused on clearly-defined issues, CIPD develops projects of particular interest to individual sponsoring companies—projects that provide direct benefits in terms of solutions to current challenges.
Many of our projects are related to the emerging field of engineering systems—the study of systems characterized by their especially large scale, complexity, and high or varying rates of change. Our core initiatives explore complex system design, development, and management—a concern of increasing importance to contemporary engineering.
CIPD research is directed by our vision that product development will be dispersed, global, and driven by new information and communication technologies. Our four core research initiatives are:
- Distributed Object Modeling Environment (DOME): Professor David Wallace, lead
- Virtual Customer: Professor John Hauser, lead
- Information Flow Modeling: Dr. Daniel Whitney, lead
- Platform Architecture: Professor Olivier L. De Weck, lead
Distributed Object Modeling Environment
Distributed Object Modeling Environment (DOME) represents a fundamentally new approach to integrated modeling and simulation. Our first test bed, DOME can integrate the development efforts of many product designers working on radically different platforms in widely dispersed locations. DOME's user-friendly web-based environment allows all designers to participate simultaneously in the modeling process.
Exploiting advances in information technology, DOME can predict and model the integrated characteristics of large, complex, rapidly-evolving products. As it maintains information integrity, DOME provides the management controls of a centralized system while preserving the responsiveness of a locally autonomous system.
Project DOME seeks to create a global community—or marketplace—of simulation services. Much as the worldwide web enables global access to static information, DOME seeks to provide global access to dynamic simulation services through a World-Wide Simulation Web (WWSW).
In 2002–2003 we began implementing a completely new, third-generation DOME representation. This breakthrough involved four key components: a build application that lets users create multiple interfaces for existing models, and create integrative models between simulations; a deploy application that sets permissions on interfaces and moves models to servers; a server application that solves the execution of distributed models and manages interactions with multiple, distributed clients; and a run application that lets users browse the simulation web and execute models. A major undertaking, this new implementation is now ready for application.
Virtual Customer
Advances in Internet technology now allow marketing research to be fully integrated into the PD process. Our Virtual Customer (VC) projects are designed to make PD teams and customers joint participants in a dynamic and mutually beneficial exchange of information. Our projects pursue a radically reduced lag time between customer input and PD response, and at a fraction of current cost.
The Virtual Customer web site (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/vc/) is a major practical output of the project. The site includes working papers and demos of various VC methods. It also posts open-source code that lets researchers and practitioners download software applicable to market research.
Our research during the 2002-2003 academic year has both matured and begun new directions. Seven papers were completed—two are now published, two have been accepted for publication, two are close to acceptance, and one is under submission. An eighth paper will soon be available in working paper format. The paragraphs below discuss the progress of our individual VC projects.
FastPace. Conjoint analysis is a method for measuring customer preference for given product features. This popular method is both reliable and valid, but its application is limited to relatively few product features (even so, data analysis can take months). Our FastPace method (Fast Polyhedral Adaptive Conjoint Estimation ) is the first new idea in metric conjoint analysis in twenty years. FastPace uses new math programming concepts to undertake web-based conjoint studies using larger numbers of features. This year we demonstrated FastPace's superiority to existing methods when customers are heterogeneous in their preferences and/or responses can be accurately obtained. We also developed more transportable code, which will soon be posted on our web site.
FastPace CBC. FastPace was developed for metric data—that is, data in which customers provide a scaled rating of hypothetical products. In recent years, an alternative questioning format called Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis (CBC) has become popular. In CBC, customers are simply presented with a choice among hypothetical products; their preferences for features are inferred from choices they make. Developing a polyhedral method for the CBC format was a major technical challenge. We overcame it with FastPace CBC—the first-ever adaptive questioning procedure for CBC. We have demonstrated its superiority to existing methods in many domains. We also applied it to the design of new executive education programs for MIT's Sloan School.
Listening In. Increasingly, consumers use the web to research products. Most automobile customers, for example, use the web to gather information before buying a vehicle. At some web sites, a virtual advisor questions customers about their needs, then recommends appropriate vehicles. Our research project has developed methods to "listen in" on electronic dialogues with these virtual advisors to determine new unmet needs and to discover opportunities for new vehicle platforms. We have applied this method to the truck market to identify two new truck segments.
Configurators. The VC initiative has developed a configurator methodology that lets customers indicate their preferences by dragging features to virtual products. Serendipitously, this research has led to additional research on how to improve accuracy relative to managerial needs in all forms of conjoint analysis. After completing extensive Monte Carlo experiments, we are writing a working paper that presents our findings.
Information Pump. The Information Pump (IP) was developed in previous years as an incentive-compatible means to determine customer needs. Our focus for the past year has been to extend the current IP in two directions. First, we have sought to provide a solution to the theoretical problem of creating incentives for closed-ended evaluations supplied by the client. Second, we hoped to implement an asynchronous version of the IP. Both of these extensions were inspired by discussions with interested companies and with CIPD sponsors. To date, we have essentially solved the first problem, and will continue work on the second over the coming academic year.
Reinforcement Learning. Reinforcement learning and machine learning allow for the development of super-adaptive methods, which allow systems to evolve automatically as participants respond to survey questions. This year we focused on catalog databases, and the decision a firm must make about to whom catalogs should be mailed. We developed and tested a model to optimize mailing decisions, and it resulted in near-optimal mailing policies. We are now validating the model through a large-scale field study of 60,000 customers. At the study's end, we will analyze the firm's profits relative to various customer segments. We are also extending our model to develop product design and promotion strategies that target individual customers.
Genetic Algorithms for Product Design. A new project, this research investigates the use of genetic algorithms to identify new features and new customer segments simultaneously. We are working with a commercial firm to test their methods, and to compare them to extant virtual customer methods. Once we understand the capabilities of genetic algorithms, we hope to develop a practical, open-source method.
CARDS. One of our earliest applications in the VC initiative was web-based conjoint analysis. Our improved version—CARDS (Conjoint Adaptive Referral Database System)—seeks to drastically reduce the number of profiles presented to a respondent in the full-profile format. Initial simulations suggest that the method may dramatically reduce the number of questions that each respondent must be asked, and may even make the questions themselves easier. We will be testing relative accuracy in the coming academic year.
Ideation. VC research to date has focused on obtaining information from customers so that product developers can generate new design ideas. But customers themselves can be a rich source of design ideas. We have therefore developed a web-based asynchronous method that is incentive compatible—rewarding participants for ideas that are novel and relevant. We have tested an initial prototype in a real context, will refine the theory during the next six months, and will simultaneously develop additional testing prototypes.
Information Flow Modeling (IFM)
The IFM initiative develops advanced methods for managing the knowledge used in engineering design. In particular, our initiative helps engineers and managers to achieve greater value during a complex product's development cycle. We use design structure matrices (DSMs) to model the knowledge exchange during a project's early development. Our aim is to better convert top-level specifications into component specifications, and to ensure that components in complex systems work harmoniously. The resulting visual representations provide an integrated map of all development activities, and a gateway to PD process improvement.
Concurrent Process Mapping, Organizations, and Project and Knowledge Management in Large-Scale PD Projects Using the DSM Method. Complex product development requires the integration of many domains that are in themselves highly dynamic and complex. Successful PD requires that the overall process be intelligently designed and managed. This project investigated Design Structure Matrix (DSM) as a tool for integrating the various domains of complex product development.
Based on studies at PSA Peugeot-Citroën in Paris and Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, this project verified DSM's value in guiding and reconciling product design, project management, organizational management, system-level knowledge generation and management, process improvement, and other domains necessary for sustainable product development. The project concluded successfully in May 2003.
Product Development Process Design. Companies that develop new products employ product development processes (PDPs) to coherently manage development risks. Well-designed PDPs reduce development time, create better products, generate profit, and increase market share. But poorly-designed PDPs can harm the product lines and the companies themselves. This multi-year project focused on improving companies' PD response to various technical and market risks, and on helping firms to improve their PD process design decisions.
Introducing PDPs as risk management frameworks, this project developed case studies that focused on ten companies in various industry sectors (Siemens-Westinghouse, ITT, Xerox, Printco, UTC, etc.). We compared traditional stage gate PDPs with newer variants such as spiral, modified waterfall, evolutionary prototyping, and evolutionary delivery. Our research showed that PDPs vary significantly more than was previously documented. We suggested metrics for distinguishing PDPs, and proposed a method for improving their design based on risk and integration.
Platform Architecture (PA)
If a company produces only a few simple products, it can successfully develop each independently of the others. But as a company increases the number and complexity of its products, it maximizes effectiveness by evolving from a product-by-product approach to a system approach. The result is a family of products based on common technologies and subsystems—the product platform. This initiative is developing comprehensive and dependable system architecture principles for vehicle family design.
Motor vehicle companies are seeking to optimize the number and type of vehicle platforms; the goal is to reduce production costs and development time while maintaining product variety. Increasingly heterogeneous customer demands have driven the trend towards a fragmentation of the automotive market for cars and trucks with smaller per-vehicle sales volumes. Success in this competitive environment requires the application of sound system architecture principles in vehicle family design. General Motors in particular —the world's largest automobile company, with sales in 2002 of 8.5 million vehicles and 12 different brands—faces a daunting challenge due to its diverse product family.
CIPD is increasingly interested in the PD aspects of engineering systems, and this initiative is assisting GM to develop a methodology for architecting the platforms of its vehicle families. Begun in 2002, this initiative will, over the next year, establish a baseline of current platform architecture practices at GM, determine the constraints used for system architecture optimization, then begin preliminary vehicle platform architecting with application to a specific GM vehicle family.
Product Family and Platform Portfolio Optimization. This project is developing a methodology to determine the optimum number of product platforms for a given product family. The methodology will help manufacturers reduce product family manufacturing costs and development times by implementing platform strategies. The methodology is based on a target market segment analysis, a market leader's performance vs. price position, and a two-level optimization approach for platform and variant designs. In collaboration with General Motors, we are demonstrating our proposed methodology for a hypothetical automotive vehicle family that attempts to serve seven different vehicle market segments. Results conclude that the use of three distinct platforms maximizes overall profit by pursuing a horizontal leveraging strategy. An offshoot of this research will be a paper delivered at the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference in Chicago, in September 2003.
Additional Research
Tools for Risk Management in Product Verification. To evaluate new design concepts, product developers must perform numerous verification tests and simulations. However, no single test can fully anticipate the risks inherent in a given design. Therefore developers must consider trade-offs between various tests to determine a testing plan that maximizes confidence while minimizing testing time and cost. In other words, developers need a "best value" testing strategy.
This project uses a model based on estimation theory to forecast risk reduction. By quantifying the likely risk reduction of various testing activities, and by accounting for testing cost/time, we seek to identify cost-effective testing strategies to balance risk management against resource investment. In academic year 2002–2003, our collaboration with Ford Motor Company led to the modeling of their Design Verification Process for automobile hoods using Computer Aided Simulation (CAE) and laboratory testing. This project will conclude in the summer of 2003 with optimization calculations for resource allocation to reduce overall risk.
System Dynamics, Project Management, and Resource Allocation. The System Dynamics (SD) method is widely used to understand sources of success and failure in large-scale design and development efforts; this project will broaden the method's application. First, we will complete a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of existing literature that applies SD to the management of new product development. Pursuing an "open source" strategy, we will create a web site that provides access to SD models (many currently unpublished) that capture elements of new product development processes. Second, our review will inform our own work on understanding the dynamics involved when multiple projects compete for a common resource pool. Ultimately, we want to develop a decision-support tool that will allow managers to run scenarios before making resource allocation decisions.
Education Programs
CIPD is an interdisciplinary program between the MIT's School of Engineering and School of Management. We believe that a students' course experiences should address the interplay between the technical, social, and system elements of product development, and should prepare them for work in a globally distributed services marketplace. Our PD education programs target three communities: working professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates.
For Working Professionals
The SDM Product Development Track was created in collaboration with MIT's System Design and Management (SDM) program. This 24-month distance learning degree program (or 13-month on-campus program) targets mid-career engineering professionals who are potential leaders in product development settings. At graduation, students receive an MIT degree in Engineering and Management.
Since the program's inception in 1997, 23 CIPD faculty members have participated in SDM's Product Development track. Nearly 300 students from 55 organizations have enrolled, with over 200 students graduating. In 2003, participating organizations included Ford, IBM, Raytheon, Sun Microsystems, UTC, and many others. Approximately 30 students began the program in January 2003, and a like number graduated between September 2002 and June 2003. SDM plans to keep its cohort at approximately 30–40 students per year using the current format.
Executive Education Courses. CIPD faculty members created and taught a full suite of short courses as non-degree programs. These industrial mini-courses have been offered throughout the year through MIT's office of summer professional programs and through Sloan's office of special executive programs. Since the center's inception, over 2000 students have attended. In academic year 2002–2003, approximately 240 students attended.
Systems Engineering Course. CIPD director Chris Magee coteaches course ESD.33J Systems Engineering with CIPD researcher Dan Frey. The course examines the sources of complexity that can adversely affect new product design and development, and formulates a systems engineering process that can mitigate the effects of complexity. Subject materials and exercises are complemented by special event seminars showcasing speakers from industry and government. Class size averages about 40 students—most enrolled in the SDM PD Track.
For Graduate and Undergraduate Students
Graduate Course. Professor Steve Eppinger of the IFM initiative teaches a semester-long class 15.783J/2.739J/ESD.32J Product Design and Development. The class focuses on integrating the design, manufacturing, and marketing functions in a new product development firm. The course's associated web site (its construction was supported by CIPD) provides extensive resources for students, as well as support materials for faculty who are teaching comparable courses at other institutions. The site is organized around the book Product Design and Development as taught at MIT, and can be found at http://www.ulrich-eppinger.net/.
Doctoral Seminar. CIPD Director Chris Magee, in collaboration with other faculty, taught the ESD doctoral seminar ESD.934 Engineering Systems in the fall of 2002. Designed to codify current thinking about the emerging field of engineering systems, and to give direction for its future development, this seminar is helping to shape the structure and operation of the ESD PhD curriculum at MIT.
Freshman Course. 2.009 The Product Engineering Process helps undergraduates understand the phases of product development. Taught by CIPD initiative leader David Wallace, director Chris Magee, and senior lecturer Sandy Campbell, students form teams that design and construct high-quality product prototypes. Students learn to reason about design alternatives, and apply modeling techniques appropriate to different development phases.
Noon Seminars. In AY2003, CIPD hosted nearly 20 lunchtime seminars. These informal talks included presentations by researchers at CIPD and throughout the Institute. Speakers also included product developers from industry and researchers from universities including Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Illinois.
During the past academic year, CIPD funded 12 PhD and 9 Masters candidates. Of those, one PhD and two Masters students graduated in June 2003.
Outreach
The Center's outreach activities introduce organizations to our research, and open new venues for a vigorous exchange of ideas between academic investigators and industry practitioners.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Conference. In October 2003, CIPD will sponsor a day-long conference exploring strategies for the successful implementation of product lifecycle programs. Presentations by CIPD faculty will complement those by corporate technical managers in the aerospace, automobile, and health care industries. We anticipate attendance from 20 selected large companies that employ CAD-driven PD processes.
CIPD/ILP Conference: Innovations in Product Development. In October 2002, CIPD cosponsored with MIT's Industrial Liaison Program this two-day conference focused on engineering manufacturing. Seeking to help companies identify high-value product portfolios, future market opportunities, and customer requirements, this conference hosted 200 attendees from around the world. Representatives arrived from nearly 50 companies, including 3M, GE, Gillette, Goodyear, IBM, ITT, Michelin, Motorola, Nissan, Nestle, Raytheon, Saab, and Xerox.
Fourth International Design Structure Matrix Workshop. Also in October 2002, CIPD cosponsored this workshop on DSM (Design Structure Matrix) along with the Lean Aerospace Initiative, Leaders for Manufacturing, and the Ford Motor Company. Over 20 speakers presented research at this highly interactive gathering, which was attended by 50 participants from industry, government, and academia.
Naval-Industry R&D Partnership Conference. In August 2002, CIPD attended this annual conference, which included presentations on the emerging terrorist threat as a challenge to product developers. CIPD personnel took part in the First Responders Robotics Business War Game, a special program highlighting the potential for small portable robots to aid emergency first responders.
Visiting Scholars. This past year, two visiting scholars completed their CIPD-sponsored research and returned to their respective universities—Helsinki University of Technology and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Sponsorship
CIPD has evolved into a focused research center investigating specific problems for individual companies. We seek clearly defined projects for organizations whose industrial applications match the research interests of our faculty. Because we concentrate on solving specific problems, we must manage an ongoing turnover of work—successfully completing old projects while generating new projects with new organizations.
In academic year 2002–2003, we formally concluded our research partnership with IBM, and are continuing our work with General Motors. Looking to the future, we are optimistic about discussions underway for new work with IBM, as well as discussions with Novell, Northrop-Grumman, and other companies heavily invested in complex product development.
As noted above, we will host a conference in the fall of 2003 on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). One purpose of the conference is to showcase our research to prospective clients, and to demonstrate how our projects can shape the successful management of the complex product lifecycle. After careful screening, we have invited approximately twenty companies whose PD processes align with the expertise of our faculty. Based on response thus far, we expect the conference to be an important venue for initiating new sponsorship opportunities.
Personnel
Personnel changes in 2002–2003 were minimal, reflecting CIPD's growing stability and assurance as a focused research center. Director Chris Magee continues to guide the Center's product development investigations with a concentration on complex systems; Professor Magee's extensive background in product development is the result of many years in R&D for the Ford Motor Company. Nils Nordal continues to serve as the Center's Assistant Director, with Michael Mack as Communications Coordinator, and Kathleen Sullivan as Office and Finance Manager.
In July 2002, Susan MacPhee joined CIPD staff as Media Design and Production Specialist. Her talents in web design have significantly enhanced CIPD's internet presence.
More information about the Center for Innovation in Product Development can be found on the web at http://cipd.mit.edu/.
Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development
Diverse research interests—furthering broadband Internet equity, uncovering obstacles to build-to-order cars, and ratcheting up lean production to the aerospace enterprise level—fall under the aegis of the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development (CTPID). The center's 10 programs, which cover several major industries, are united by their commitment to developing sustainable solutions to industry problems and policy perspectives that render economic and societal benefits.
CTPID research is in the forefront of several new collaborative ventures:
- Materials Systems Lab (MSL) PI Joel Clark, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, will codirect a new joint lab funded by a five-year General Motors Corporation grant. The lab will develop advanced material processing and manufacturing systems for global automotive operations based on MSL-developed models.
- Internet and Telecoms Convergence (ITC) program PI David Clark, senior research scientist at the Lab for Computer Science, is codirecting a new MIT-wide Communications Futures Program that will draw on ITC's expertise in economic and policy analysis.
- MIT Information Quality (MIT IQ) Director Richard Wang, CTPID Principal Research Scientist, has launched a certificate program to train information quality professionals with support from the US Navy and industry partners.
Industry and government partnerships like these are key to CTPID's efforts to support global economic growth and advance policies that preserve the environment and benefit society. Founded in 1985, CTPID's programs aim to advance knowledge and to provide an enriched intellectual environment for MIT faculty and students. More than 160 faculty, researchers, and staff work with some 80 sponsors to define and resolve industry concerns and public policy issues.
CTPID's research impact includes industry-wide changes prompted by the International Motor Vehicle Program's (IMVP) groundbreaking book, The Machine That Changed the World, and critical benchmarking studies. The Lean Aerospace Initiative, founded in 1993 to bring Machine's insights to a new industry, captured their decade of research in a 2002 book titled Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative. This year, ITC leaders, who spearheaded a national review of US deployment practices published in 2002 as Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits, are sharing global lessons about the impact of high speed Internet access.
Accomplishments
MIT-Sandia Workshop: Some 25 Sandia National Laboratories and Engineering Systems Division researchers explored technological and analytical approaches to making U.S. infrastructures more resilient to national security threats during a Oct. 17–18 workshop at MIT's Endicott House. Led by Sandia's Sam Varnado and MIT's George Apostolakis and Fred Moavenzadeh and organized by CTPID, the workshop developed collaborative ideas for a joint research program.
The Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) launched Lean Now, a new government-led initiative that supports and accelerates the lean transformation of government and industry value streams and interface processes. First prototyping transformation efforts will work with the F/A-22, F-16, and Global Hawk program offices.
IMVP Postdoctoral Fellow Matthias Holweg won a second yearlong Sloan Industry Center Fellowship for work on build-to-order cars.
Holweg's dissertation, "The Three-Day Car Challenge: Investigating the Inhibitor of Responsive Order in New Vehicle Supply Systems," won the 2002 James Cooper Memorial Cup for Best PhD from the UK's Institute of Logistics and Transportation.
The Department of Labor and the Labor Aerospace Research Agenda (LARA) launched a case study on job classification compression at the Boeing Co. in St. Louis.
ITC Director David D. Clark keynoted "Broadband Divides," March 27-28, hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute and co-sponsored by ITC and Syracuse University's School of Information Studies.
ITC presented a January members workshop titled "Telecoms at the Edge" and a series of spring seminars with a new research partner - the Center for eBusiness at MIT. In the partnership, ITC will share research results as part of CeB's Communications Futures track and ITC member companies will have access to CeB research and sponsors.
CTPID co-sponsored three Industry Leaders in Technology and Management lectures with the Office of Corporate Relations and covered these events for the public through articles in Tech Talk:
- Louis Gerstner, IBM chairman, Oct. 10: "The Networked World: Are We Ready For It"
- Philip Watts, chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell group's Managing Directors, Nov. 13: "The Technology Imperative - Realizing the Potential for Innovation in Meeting Energy Challenges"
- Franz Humer, Roche Holding Ltd. chairman and CEO, Nov. 20: "The Pharmaceutical Industry in the Global Economy"
CTPID expanded its community lunch series to invited speakers addressing industry issues:
- Nokia Senior Research Manager Raj Bansal, October 29
- Boeing Overhaul and Integrated Exchange Services Director Rande Cruze, November 14
- Ford-MIT Alliance coexecutive directors Kristin Schondorf and Steven Schondorf, March 18
- LAI Industry Stakeholder Codirector/Raytheon executive Terry Bryan, May 1
DSpace, with CTPID as early adopter, went public in October. After nearly two years of development by the MIT Libraries, CTPID, and others, MIT's innovative digital archive DSpace was unveiled at a conference on scholarly publishing. The Chronicle of Higher Education called DSpace "the most ambitious and most closely watched superarchive." Papers from all ten CTPID research programs are available at https://hpds1.mit.edu/.
Major publications
- To the Desert and Back, by Ford-MIT Alliance Executive Director George Roth et al. Jossey-Bass, 2003
- Working in America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market, by LARA codirector Thomas A. Kochan et al. MIT Press 2002, paper
- IMVP Principal Investigator Matthias Holweg published two MIT Sloan Management Review articles, "Exploring Scale: The Advantages of Thinking Small" (Winter 2003) and "Successful Build-to-Order Strategies Start with the Customer" (Fall 2002), which he coauthored with IMVP researcher Frits Pil.
- Electronic copies of the Final Report of the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, coauthored by LARA researchers, are available in PDF format on the website: http://web.mit.edu/ctpid/lara/.
- A new online module developed by the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI), "Introduction to Lean Enterprise Concepts," is available free through the Defense Acquisition University's (DAU) Continuous Learning Center at http://clc.dau.mil/.
Administrative initiatives
The Materials Systems Laboratory (MSL) moved from its 238 Main Street headquarters to newly renovated offices on the fourth floor of MIT's Building E40 on Amherst Street, further consolidating the CTPID presence in E40.
Finances and funding
The Ford Motor Company and MIT announced in October the $20 million-dollar renewal of their research and education alliance for a second five-year term, extending through 2007. The Alliance is a MIT-wide initiative financially administered by CTPID.
The Lean Aerospace Initiative and the U.S. Air Force initiated a new three-year contract to support LAI's fourth phase, Enterprise Value.
Future plans
CTPID is working with MIT faculty on three research proposals aimed at national security concerns: a joint venture with Sandia National Labs that involves both individual projects and a large-scale program to be submitted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); a proposal to the National Science Foundation to establish an Engineering Research Center; and a MIT proposal to take part in DHS's university research program.
CTPID is proposing an information technology project to the Singapore-MIT Initiative to be led by Stuart Madnick, Steve Lerman, John Williams, and Richard Wang. The project, titled Singapore Hub for Integrated Information Processing (SHIIP), would provide an education and research program that would address systems issues.
Personnel information
Honors
David Clark, ITC director, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Tom Eager, codirector of the Program on Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (P-STEP), was named a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, LARA codirector, was elected to the board of Industrial Relations Research Association.
ITC research affiliate Ben Compaine won the 2002 Journal of Media Economics Award of Honor for contributions to media economics scholarship.
Professor Wesley Harris, Lean Sustainment Initiative director, was named head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Harris was selected as co-chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Product Support and Logistics Technical Committee.
Professor Sheila Widnall, LAI Executive Board co-chair and former secretary of the Air Force, was featured in the November issue of Discover Magazine among "The 50 Most Important Women in Science."
Personnel Changes
- Ford: John Heywood was named codirector of the Ford-MIT Alliance.
- LAI appointments included Raytheon executive-on-loan Terry Bryan as stakeholder codirector, former Textron VP Noel Nightingale as executive director, and Air Force Major Ronald Jobo as a LAI fellow. Donna Rhodes joined LAI as a research associate; George Roth was promoted to principal research associate with LAI. Juliet Perdichizzi joined the team as an administrative assistant.
- LARA—Lydia Fraile, who earned a PhD in political science this spring, joined LARA as a research assistant; Adam Litwin, a PhD student in MIT's Institute for Work and Employment Research, is a LARA research affiliate.
- CTPID—Administrative Assistant Emily Kearney joined the CTPID team, replacing Kerry O'Brien who is on maternity leave.
- Betty Barrett, a post-doctoral fellow with the Lean Aerospace Research Agenda, was promoted to research scientist and to associate director of the Engineering Systems Learning Center.
Visiting Scholars, Fellows, and Affiliates
Michael Best, a former director of Media Lab Asia and this year an ITC research affiliate, and Martha Garcia-Murillo, a visiting scholar from Syracuse University on sabbatical, focused their ITC work on the international impact of the Internet and broadband access.
Kristin Schondorf and Steven Schondorf, coexecutive directors of the Ford-MIT Alliance, were appointed visiting engineers in October.
David Gabel, professor of economics, Queens College, City University of New York, was an ITC visiting scholar.
Mahdi H. Mattar, a postdoctoral fellow in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, is continuing research on privatization issues as research fellow for the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development.
Fred Moavenzadeh
Director
CTPID Program Reports
Cooperative Mobility Program
The Cooperative Mobility Program (CMP) brings together transportation scholars from MIT and other universities with private sector specialists and corporate sponsors to explore current and future issues of worldwide mobility. CMP proposes a new vision: a sustainable multi-modal transportation system that will provide the mobility necessary to foster global economic development compatible with social needs and environmental concerns.
CMP is grounded in empirical research on travel behavior, technological approaches, and public policies that affect mobility in both developed and developing countries. CMP compiles an annual Mobility Observatory that tracks innovative developments in transportation policy, management, and technology.
Program research served as the basis for a large-scale global study of passenger and freight mobility and a May 2002 Sustainable Mobility Symposium, the Technology and Policy Program's second annual conference. The symposium highlighted Mobility 2001, a report commissioned by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development as a first step toward developing a vision of more sustainable mobility in the future. Mobility 2001, prepared by researchers from CMP, other MIT programs, and by Charles River Associates, is the most comprehensive and large-scale global initiative in sustainable transport.
More information about CMP, which is directed by Daniel Roos, associate dean for Engineering Systems, can be found on the web at http://esd.mit.edu/ctpid/cmp/cmp-home.htm.
Ford-MIT Alliance
In an innovative program, the Ford Motor Company has engaged the Institute in addressing an array of 21st century challenges confronting the automotive manufacturer. The initial multimillion-dollar, five-year alliance began in 1997 with a focus on three research areas: product development process technology, virtual education, and the environment. The research areas now include product development process technology, the environment, active safety, and powertrain. An objective of the alliance is the development of effective mechanisms for long-term, corporate-university partnerships. MIT and the Ford Motor Company renewed the Alliance for another five years.
The new projects:
- Oxygen Reduction Mechanisms in SOFC (Y. Shao-Horn). State-of-the art nano-fabrication, characterization, and experimental studies of SOFCs with goals of lowering operating temperatures and increasing power to enhance potential automotive applications.
- Variability Strategies for Robust Design (D. Frey)
- Develop optimum strategies for simulating variability and noise in system models to improve robustness of designs
- Determine when it is safe to compound variability sources or to drop variability sources based on screening experiments
- Determine when it is best to use separate outer and inner arrays versus an all-in-one approach for designed experiments
- Decouple Control and Vibration (M. Culpepper)
- Develop the theory and design tools needed to create and analyze the new decoupling machine elements
- Validate experimentally the performance of decoupling control and vibration in a Ford steering system
- Extend work to suspension design
- HCCI Research (Cheng/Green)
- Develop a fundamental physical understanding of the optimized kinetic combustion process
- Define stability limits and operational windows for HCCI
- Demonstrate robust and smooth mode transitions between HCCI and spark ignition combustion that minimize impact on fuel use and emissions
- Develop and test a prototype single cylinder Optimized Kinetic Process HCCI combustion system
- Engine Lubrication Oil Aeration Study (W. Cheng)
- Quantify dominant oil aeration mechanisms on the bench
- Model oil aeration mechanisms
- Determine the effect of oil properties on aeration
- Analysis and design of engine/vehicle control software using a hybrid of continuous-time and discrete-time controls. (M. Dahleh). Use a robust automation/hybrid control approach to develop general and practical methodology for design and synthesis of effective and optimal controls for advanced powertrains and vehicle systems.
- Advanced Natural Language Interface. (J. Glass). Create a user interface strategy that would allow a more natural speech interaction than current vehicle voice systems (navigation, car phone, music, etc).
George Roth has left his executive director position and a search is on for his replacement. John Heywood has replaced Dan Roos as director for MIT. Steven and Kristin Schondorf have replaced Chris Magee as directors for Ford.
June 26th was MIT Technology Day at Ford. Fifteen faculty members and students traveled to Dearborn, MI to give seminars on their research to the Ford community and to network with colleagues to increase the effectiveness of their collaborations.
As a partner in this Institute-wide initiative, CTPID supports over a dozen projects and twenty researchers working on Ford-MIT projects. MIT faculty involved in the Ford-MIT Alliance use conferences, videoconferences, web sites, and virtual forums to communicate the results of this work to both Ford and the general public. More information about the Ford-MIT Alliance can be found on the web at http://ford-mit.mit.edu/.
International Motor Vehicle Program
The International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP), through its global network of researchers, examines critical developments in production paradigms, management systems, and technological innovation that can contribute to the future health of the automotive industry.
IMVP, the largest international research group studying and reporting on the automobile industry and its global milieu, engaged 16 faculty and seven graduate students in 20 research projects this year. Worldwide they visited 105 industry enterprises and 75 plants and gathered data from 28 companies. IMVP hosted two workshops, and researchers made more than 40 presentations to academic conferences, industry, trade groups, and government agencies. IMVP researchers netted 18 honors and major publications, published 11 industry trade journal articles, developed four new courses or academic programs, and graduated three PhDs in the field.
Sample findings from IMVP research projects:
- Round Three of the International Assembly Plant Study reports a convergence in labor efficiency worldwide, but persistent gaps on quality and capacity for handling product variety among U.S., European, and Japanese producers.
- Extended Enterprise supply chain research finds that tensions are rising between mega-suppliers and OEMs as cost containment pressures collide with a new division of labor that shifts design responsibility to suppliers.
- Build-to-Order project finds that interest in BTO continues to grow but is inhibited by information barriers and delays throughout the supply chain, continued large inventories in distribution, and the need for stronger supplier capabilities.
- Supplier park study traces the trend to colocate suppliers with assembly plants during retrofits in the US and Europe and evaluates its staying power.
- International product development study reports on trends in China's motorcycle industry as a possible leading indicator for autos, as grass-roots experiments by Chinese firms imitating Japanese designs promote more modular product architecture.
- Savings and efficiencies from OEM strategic alliances may be overrated, the Gains from Alliance project finds.
Matthias Holweg won a second, one-year Alfred P. Sloan Industry Centers Fellowship to conduct build-to-order research at IMVP program headquarters at CTPID. Holweg won the 2002 James Cooper Memorial Cup for Best PhD, an annual award from the UK's Institute of Logistics and Transportation. Holweg co-authored "Exploring Scale" with IMVP researcher Frits Pil published in the Winter Sloan Management Review.
This year sponsors for Phase IV, Navigating Auto's Next Economy (NextAuto) included the Toyota Motor Corporation, Honda Motor Car Company, Nissan Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, the South Africa Department of Trade and Industry and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Some 40 researchers and sponsors shared new research and industry insights at a Sept. 17–18, 2002, Sponsors Meeting at MIT's Endicott House. Industry executives from Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Nissan Motor Company presented aspects of their recent work. Ford's Nathan Everett and Professor Charles Fine discussed telematics. Jon Dennis and Roger Vardan represented GM and Kenji Ikeura represented Nissan on the industry/research panel on technology alliances. Dr. James P. Womack, president of the Lean Enterprise Institute, discussed his recent work on a book tentatively titled, The Solution Economy.
A global gathering of IMVP researchers and affiliates at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, hosted April 2–3 by IMVP. Codirector John Paul MacDuffie, discussed industry changes from Detroit to Brazil. The two day session included demonstrations of interactive teaching tools including a web-based case study of brownfield transformation developed by the MIT Engineering Systems Learning Center headed by CTPID's Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.
IMVP's NextAuto Phase provides industry-wide knowledge and insight essential to helping companies make strategic decisions. Since 1980, IMVP has provided an unbiased, detailed, and integrated view of the dynamics of the worldwide automotive industry and its important drivers. IMVP and its predecessor, the Future of the Automobile program, have received funding from the Sloan Foundation, automakers worldwide, their suppliers, and government groups since the late '70s.
NextAuto reflects sponsor feedback urging IMVP to draw upon its historic strengths to examine the industry's next challenges. Through NextAuto, launched in September 2000, IMVP researchers and their industry partners are integrating research capabilities on the extended enterprise with the new opportunities afforded by e-business and catalyzed by environmental and sustainability issues. Over twenty projects are underway in 2002–2003 in the following research areas:
- Managing the extended enterprise
- Benchmarking the value chain
- Modularity and outsourcing
- R&D: product development strategies
- Building skills and capabilities across boundaries
- E-Automotive
- e-Supply chains and hubs
- e-Powered consumers/build-to-order
- Telematics: vehicle as IT/telecom platform
- Visions For A Sustainable Future
- Green drive trains
- New materials, recycling, and environmental management
- Mobility solutions
Future Plans
IMVP is seeking funding to build a stronger administrative infrastructure to support sustainable relationships with current and future sponsors. Plans include hiring an executive director, creating an advisory board made up of senior industry executives, and developing a wider array of methods and mechanisms for interacting with sponsors.
Associate professor John Paul MacDuffie at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is IMVP codirector and Professor Fred Moavenzadeh is acting codirector. Donna Carty is program manager.More information about IMVP can be found on the web at http://imvp.mit.edu/.
Labor Aerospace Research Agenda
The Labor Aerospace Research Agenda (LARA) began in June 1998 with the belief that people are at the heart of new work systems—establishing stability and then driving continuous improvement. LARA was designed to further the understanding of this critical social dimension of lean principles in the aerospace industry.
In its early phases, LARA administered a national aerospace survey to further the understanding of the impact of instability on employment and work practices in the aerospace industry. Working with the Lean Aerospace Initiative, several case studies and other reports have been developed to increase the understanding at the facility and individual levels. These include the following:
- Case Study: A Decade of Learning
- International Association of Machinists and Boeing Joint Programs
- Case Study: Transformation Through Employee Involvement and Workplace Training: The Challenge of a Changing Business Contex
- Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power and the United Automobile Workers
- Case Study: Employing Activity-Based Costing and Management Practices Within the Aerospace Industry: Sustaining the Drive for Lean. Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, Wichita Division, and the International Association of Machinists.
- Case Study: Fostering Workplace Innovation and Labor-Management Partnership: The Challenge of Strategic Shifts in Business Operations
- Pratt and Whitney (UTC) and the International Association of Machinists
- Case Study: Fostering Continuous Improvement in a Changing Business Context. Textron Systems
- Case Study: From Three to One: Integrating a High-Performance Work Organization Process, Lean Production, and Activity-Based Costing Change Initiatives. Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, Wichita Division, and the International Association of Machinists.
LARA has also published a guide, Collective Bargaining in the Face of Instability: A Resource for Workers and Employers in the U.S. Aerospace Industry.
In 2002–2003, LARA presented testimony twice based on its white paper, "Developing a 21st Century Aerospace Workforce." First, project co-PI Tom Kochan testified before the US Commission on the Future of the Aerospace Industry and then project co-PI Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld testified before a special session for congressional staff, sponsored by ASME and other professional associations. The LARA team is continuing to work with the US Department of Labor on the implementation of recommendations from this commission. We are also conducting a study on workforce flexibility and employability with funding from the US Department of Labor, based on innovations at the Boeing/IAM St. Louis facility. LARA also contributed to the book Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative (Palgrave, 2002), which is a LAI capstone product. A working paper on "Lean Transformation in the U.S. Aerospace Industry: Appreciating Interdependent Social and Technical Systems" was produced in February 2002 by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld. Two new case studies were also completed in 2002—one on Rockwell Collins and one on the Boeing/IAM training programs. In January, 2003, LARA organized a special panel on the aerospace workforce at Industrial Relations Research Association meetings.
LARA is a MIT-based team conducting research with funding provided via the Manufacturing Technology initiative of the U.S. Air Force and other sources. LARA's coprincipal investigators/codirectors are Senior Research Scientist Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and Professor Thomas A. Kochan. More information about LARA can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/ctpid/lara/.
Lean Aerospace Initiative
Current goals, objectives, priorities
In its third phase of operations, the Enterprise Value Phase (September 1, 2002–August 31, 2005), the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) shifted its research focus to understanding the interactions between and across various core enterprise functions. The main organizing principles of this new phase reflect the crucial insights set forth in the 2002 book Lean Enterprise Value: Insights From MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative. Lean is not just a matter of elimination of waste, the book contends. Becoming lean is a process of eliminating waste with the goal of creating value for enterprise stakeholders.
With the knowledge, know-how, and tools researched and developed in this phase, the national aerospace enterprise will be able to more quickly improve its capability and agility in delivering best lifecycle value. Additionally, enterprise-level research will provide the foundation for emerging systems approaches to enterprise architecting and enterprise transformation.
During the past year, LAI continued to uphold its mission to research, develop and promulgate knowledge, principles, practices, and tools to enable and accelerate the transformation of the greater US aerospace enterprise through people and processes. Six goals provide the framework for consortium efforts:
Goal 1: Support the ongoing lean transformation of industry
Goal 2: Enable a lean value-creating supplier base
Goal 3: Support lean transformation of the government
Goal 4: Educate and train stakeholders in value-creating lean principles
and practices
Goal 5: Enhance the effectiveness of the national workforce
Goal 6: Support member lean implementation efforts by sustaining tools and
knowledge base and by sponsoring outreach events
Transforming the US Aerospace Enterprise
Industry members of the consortium have, with the support of LAI, made significant progress in implementing lean principles and practices in production operations. As a consortium, there are noted "islands of success," but the expectation is to continue recognizing opportunities for the enterprise as it is the latter that represents greater value. Consider these enterprise level value propositions:
- The C-17 unit price decreased from $260M to $178 M for the final 80 aircraft of the 120 aircraft buy
- A JDAM unit price of $15K compared to initial estimate of $68K
- Northrop Grumman ISS lean enterprise implementation reduced throughput times for major systems by 21-42 percent
- Both JSF competitors aggressively adopted lean principles and practices in their designs
To catalyze future enterprise transformation, particularly among government stakeholders, LAI rolled out Lean Now in 2002. Lean Now, a government-conceived initiative, is a total enterprise team facilitated through LAI to leverage collective knowledge, eliminate barriers that impede progress, and capitalize on government and industry teamwork. Lean Now taps industry expertise by creating a cadre of coaches and trainers known as LAI Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). The effort takes a spiral approach as it engages program prototypes. Spiral One included the F/A-22, F-16, and Global Hawk system programs.
Accomplishments
In the past year, LAI also stepped up efforts to help transform the US aerospace enterprise by developing and deploying education programs as well as leadership and transformational tools steeped in ongoing research.
LAI research—Key questions drive ongoing and future LAI research efforts:
- How to architect/design future lean enterprises?
- Lifecycle value creation perspective
- Organizing principles
- Integration strategies
- How to accelerate lean enterprise transformation?
- Workforce and cultural change
- Metrics for motivating desired behavior
- Information technologies
- How to build evolving and adapting lean enterprises?
- Evolutionary acquisition & spiral development
- Knowledge management
- Fostering innovation across acquisition value stream
Recently published research in reports, conference papers, and student theses includes observations and recommendations in these areas:
- The Pursuit of Acquisition Intrapreneurs," U.S. Air Force Acquisition Fellow.
- A Holistic Approach to Manufacturing System Design in the Defense Aerospace Industry"
- Value Stream Analysis and Mapping for Product Development"
- Lean Enterprise Self-Assessment as a Leading Indicator for Accelerating Transformation in the Aerospace Industry"
- Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration with Concurrent Design as a Value-Centric Framework for Space System Architecture and Design"
- Product Development Processes and Their Importance to Organizational Capabilities"
- Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration and its Application to Evolutionary Acquisition"
LAI Products
The Government Lean Enterprise Self-Assessment Tool—The alpha version of this product is complete and ready for testing in a government setting. This tool was built on the foundation provided by LESAT (Lean Enterprise Self Assessment Tool) and reconstructed relative to System Program Office (SPO) operations.
EVSMA (Enterprise Value Stream Mapping & Analysis)—This product presents a coherent method for analyzing and improving enterprise performance, integrating strategic objectives, stakeholder interests, and process performance. It is a decision aid for enterprise executives to identify barriers to the creation/delivery of value to each stakeholder, specify a vision of their future lean enterprise, determine significant gaps between current and future states, and to prioritize opportunities.
Product Development Value Stream Analysis and Mapping Manual (PDVSM)—This is a practical guide tackling the application of lean to product development. It is focused at the tactical level engineering process improvement and is a summary and reference for 4+ years of product development group experience facilitated through LAI.
Supplier Networks Management Toolset—This integrate set of products includes the supplier management assessment tool for self-assessment of internal progress in creating lean supply chain management capabilities, the Roadmap, a how-to guide for building lean supplier networks, and a Reference Guide with lean principles for supply chain management.
LAI Knowledge Deployment
- Lean Aerospace Initiative Educational Network (LAI EdNet) is about active communication and collaboration among member schools supporting the transformation of the greater US aerospace enterprise. Its mission is to support continuous learning throughout the US aerospace enterprise by sharing knowledge and curriculum developed by EdNet members including Defense Acquisition University, Loyola Marymount University, University of Michigan, University of New Orleans, University of Tennessee, University of Texas at Arlington, and Wichita State University.
- Lean Summer Academy Pilot is a one-week offering targeted at undergraduate students in conjunction with an industry experience, such as an internship or co-op assignment. The inaugural Lean Academy class completed a pilot offering of the Lean Summer Academy June 6, 2003 at Rolls-Royce Corporation in Indianapolis, IN for 25 summer interns. The faculty for the week included participation from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and the Krannert School of Management at Purdue. It was a successful week, with feedback from one student, "Incredible, I learned so much in the week!"
- Transformation Across Enterprise Boundaries: Pioneering the Future of Aerospace is an annual stakeholder event that brought more than 250 lean learners together from across the aerospace industry to help shape the future of the aerospace industry by examining past and present accomplishments and the risk-takers behind them. LAI's codirector, Professor Debbie Nightingale, opened the forum by conjuring up imagery of the Wright Brothers in the early days of flight when people thought there was something "strange about man with wings." She challenged audience members by asking, "Are you ready to flap your wings?" A few odd stares might be the price of innovation.
- Other keynote speakers included General Lester Lyles, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command, and Dan Burnham, chairman and CEO, Raytheon Company, who shared their perspectives on what it takes to transform government and industry."We want to enable an expeditionary mindset and culture, be innovative, adaptive, and responsive, known as easy to do business with as well as effective and efficient," said General Lyles. "LAI is poised to enable Air Force acquisition to meet today's challenges."
Moving Forward
LAI has grown and flourished as an innovative model of industry, government, labor, and university partnership. The consortium also represents a true learning community with the ability to leverage multiple perspectives for longer-term solutions. Through this community, LAI is able to open and sustain knowledge sharing, create a common vocabulary, infuse new ideas into the industry, and enhance communication among all stakeholders. This accelerates lean transformation efforts by bridging sectors and cultures as well as organizational functions, layers, and competing interests. It also creates a system to rapidly diffuse best practices throughout the enterprise. So LAI is, in fact, poised to do for the rest of the enterprise what it did for manufacturing.
Today, LAI's learning community includes stakeholders from 38 organizations from aerospace companies, US government offices and programs, organized labor, and MIT. This consortium-guided research program continues to be led by the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in close collaboration with the Sloan School of Management and managed under the auspices of the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development (CTPID). LAI also collaborates internationally with LARP (Lean Aerospace Research Program) at Linköping University and the UK LAI.
LAI Leadership
Over the past year LAI has been managed by codirectors representing stakeholder interests: Professor Deborah Nightingale, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Professor Tom Allen, Sloan School of Management; and a third codirector from industry Frederick "Terry" Bryan, from Raytheon. On July 1, 2003, John Carroll, Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the Sloan School of Management, will succede Tom Allen.
More information about the Lean Aerospace Initiative can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/lean/.
Lean Sustainment Initiative
Established in 1997, Lean Sustainment Initiative's (LSI) mission is to enable a fundamental transformation of the US commercial and military maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) industries into cost-effective, quality-driven, timely, and responsive support enterprises. As a joint academic-military-industry consortium, LSI develops research-based recommendations for systemic change followed by the implementation of military-industry pilot projects to demonstrate the impact of the recommendations on the MRO effectiveness of the enterprises.
Wesley L. Harris, director of LSI and Charles Stark Draper professor of aeronautics and astronautics was named head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics as of July 1, 2003. This year he was selected as cochair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Product Support and Logistics Technical Committee.
More information about LSI can be found on the web at http://www.leansustainment.org/.
Materials Systems Laboratory
The Materials Systems Laboratory (MSL) is internationally recognized for its innovative work analyzing the competitive position of materials and the strategic implications of material choice. This year the Materials Systems Laboratory used two National Science Foundation grants to support work on a study of the application of environmental life cycle analysis to the automotive industry and a study of resource use implications of emerging materials.
For nearly two decades, MSL has addressed issues arising from materials choice in a range of applications, particularly those in the automotive, electronic, and aerospace industries, but with a recent emphasis on automotive applications. MSL's research sponsors include major automakers and materials suppliers. A recent agreement with General Motors, leading to the formation of the Collaborative Research Laboratory in Materials and Manufacturing Systems Analysis, will give MSL a basis for conducting more in-depth research into the strategic implications of materials and processing developments for the automobile industry.
MSL's work builds upon a unique combination of materials processing knowledge, engineering design practice, manufacturing process analysis, and environmental information to construct analytical tools for decision support and competitive analysis. To develop these tools, MSL has refined its extensions to classic engineering process modeling for the past two decades. Modeling elements have been married to elements of product design, material properties, and manufacturing assumptions to yield tools that can estimate the costs of product manufacture under a wide range of conditions. These tools analyze primary materials production, primary materials processing, component and subassembly manufacture, and end-of-life vehicle processing. In each case, these tools estimate the costs of production as a function of processing technology, material flows, operating conditions, and energy and capital requirements.
MSL also has developed techniques for understanding how markets respond to the different combinations of engineering and economic performance available by using different materials. Further, MSL researchers analyze the environmental consequences of materials and process choice, incorporating the emerging life-cycle analysis paradigm. These tools make it possible, when used with economic and engineering assessments, to develop robust, credible, and defendable product strategies that take life-cycle information into account. Richard Roth is the director of MSL. Joel Clark is principal investigator.
More information about MSL can be found on the web at http://msl1.mit.edu/msl/.
Program on Information Quality
The Program on Information Quality (MITIQ), launched in 2002, serves the public and private sectors in their need for high-quality information. Researchers of MITIQ develop and test new knowledge in the information quality field as well as develop information quality benchmarking standards.
The new program develops the information quality concept as a multi-dimensional and contextual phenomenon. Program director Richard Wang began defining the characteristics that make information a strategic tool more than fifteen years ago. MITIQ is an outgrowth of MIT's Total Data Quality Management (TDQM) Program that Wang and the School of Management's J.N. Maguire Information Technology Professor Stuart Madnick founded in 1989.
MITIQ provides a comprehensive body of information-quality knowledge and methods that:
- Deliver the benefits of improved information quality such as making well-informed strategic decisions, increasing market share, and reducing operating expenses
- Give program participants the understanding and skills to develop information quality programs and projects and to solve and prevent information quality problems
- Enable participants to solve current information quality problems and prevent future problems
- Advance the information quality field through innovative, cutting-edge research and collaboration with government and industry
- Develop information quality curriculum for academic programs and certification program for information quality professionals
Outreach
Wang teaches a three-day executive IQ course at MIT titled Information Quality: Principles and Implementation that focuses on information as a product, continuous improvement cycles for information quality, and how to conduct information quality audits.
In conjunction with the Professional Education Program, he offers an IQ certification program for information quality professionals. Information Quality Management I (IQM-I): Principles and Foundations was first offered in 2003. IQM-I will be offered again in November 2003 and 2004. IQM-II: Theory in Action, currently under development, will be offered in 2004.
Wang also leads the annual IQ Workshop hosted by the University of California at Berkeley's Fisher Center for Information Technology and Marketplace Transformation, an MITIQ partner.
Wang is coauthor of three books: Data Quality Systems (CMI, 1995), Quality Information and Knowledge (Prentice Hall, 1999), and Data Quality (Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2001). He is currently completing Journey to Data Quality (MIT Press) and AMIS Information Quality Monograph (M.E. Sharpe). Information about these books and papers can be found at http://mitiq.mit.edu/Publications.htm
Faculty and staff
Richard Wang is the program director. He is also principal research scientist for Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development and codirector of Total Data Quality Management.
Other associated faculty members are Fred Moavenzadeh, director of CTPID; James Mason, Crafts Professor of Systems Engineering and director of the Technology and Development Program;
Thomas Allen, Howard W. Johnson professor of management at the Sloan School; Stuart E. Madnick, J.N. Maguire professor of information technology at the Sloan School; and Wesley L. Harris, Charles Stark Draper professor of aeronautics and astronautics.
More information about MITIQ can be found on the web at http://mitiq.mit.edu/.
Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence
The Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence (ITC) is MIT's only sponsored research program focused on furthering the Internet's evolution into a critical, global communications infrastructure. ITC researchers and industry and academic partners investigate the technical, economic, strategic, and policy issues that arise from the convergence of telecommunications and the Internet.
A new partnership with the Center for eBusiness at MIT is bringing mutual benefit: ITC is sharing its research results as part of CeB's Communications Futures Special Interest Group (SIG) and ITC member companies will have access to CeB research and sponsors.
David Clark, ITC's director, built support for a new coalition of academic interests at the MIT Industrial Liaison Program's April 15-16 conference on "Extreme Communications: A Radical Rethinking of Business, Technology, and Regulatory Strategies." Clark and Charles Fine, program's codirectors along with the Media Lab's Andy Lippman and David Reed, framed a new concept about the communication industry's changing business and operating structures.
ITC research has shaped industry practice; filtered hype, through reality checks and identification of real R&D needs; provided advance insight into emerging technologies and business practices; and informed policy makers, forestalling premature or ill-conceived regulatory initiatives
ITC receives funding from a select group of enterprises with a strategic interest in the telecommunications and/or Internet arena. 2002–2003 members include British Telecom, Fundacion Retevision-Auna, Motorola, and Nokia.
ITC events
ITC held meetings for executive briefings and technology previews. ITC presented a two-day January 2002 meeting, "Telecoms at the Edge" in Cambridge for sponsors of ITC and the Center for eBusiness Communications Futures Special Interest Group. ITC director David D. Clark spoke on "Disrupting the Disruption" and executive director Sharon Eisner Gillett discussed "Local Government Broadband Initiatives." Topics included collaborative computing and edge network, alternative infrastructure, communications value chain roadmap, wireless at the edge, the evolving value chain, and spectrum futures.
Clark offered lessons from America's residential broadband deployment experience in a keynote to an invitation-only international conference, "Broadband Divides," March 27–28, hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute (UK) and cosponsored by ITC and Syracuse University's School of Information Studies.
ITC led the Communications Futures track at the MIT Center for eBusiness May 20–21 conference, "Defining eBusiness: Innovation, Productivity, and Market Leadership." Clark led a panel on "Money Flows in the Internet—The Challenge of Broadband"; associate director William Lehr led "Broadband Wireless Internet" panel.
Seminars
ITC held regular research seminars, with presentations by ITC researchers as well as outside guests, and contributed to several seminar series and conferences:
- Terrence McGarty—Municipal Broadband Networks: Case Studies of Works in Process; presented at ITC Research Seminar, May 29, 2003
- Sharon Gillett—The Public Sector's Role in Broadband Internet Development; presented at Center for eBusiness Research Seminar, April 30, 2003
- Sharon Gillett—What We Know (and Don't Know) about Local Public Sector Initiatives; presented at NARUC National Summit on Broadband Deployment: Accelerating the Transition, April 28, 2003
- William Lehr—Spectrum Management Reform: The Policy Debate; presented at ITC Research Seminar, March 20, 2003
- William Lehr—Wireless Broadband Futures; presented at Center for eBusiness Research Seminar, March 12, 2003
Accomplishments
Clark was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences during a ceremony on October 5.
ITC affiliate researcher Ben Compaine, keynote speaker of the 5th Annual World Media Economics Conference in Turku, Finland, won the 2002 Journal of Media Economics Award of Honor for his contributions to media economics scholarship and to development of the discipline.
ITC affiliate researcher Lee W. McKnight was appointed as associate professor of Information Studies in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He won a NSF Partnerships for Innovation program grant, entitled "Virtual Markets in Wireless Communication and Computation Grids," a joint venture with Tufts, MIT, Northeastern, Boston University, and TeleCom City.
A September 23 report of the US Department of Commerce cites Berkshire Connect, a case study by ITC Executive Director Sharon Gillett,as a notable example of a demand aggregation Broadband Internet project. The report on broadband access innovations in Western Massachusetts was also cited in a White Paper of the Technology Policy Group, an arm of the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
ITC invited Nokia Senior Research Manager Raj Bansal to speak to CTPID's Industry Issues lunch series, Oct. 29. He commented on how telecom and information technology industries are looking at new ways of ensuring revenue growth as subscriber growth rates have dropped since the late 1990s.
MITWorld chose to feature two ITC workshops as online videos: "Communications Value Chain Roadmap," by Charles Fine, ITC researcher and Sloan management professor; and "Spectrum Futures" by David Reed, MIT Media Laboratory Research Scientist, and Evan Kwerel, Senior Economist, Office of Plans and Policy, US Federal Communications Commission. See MITWorld: http://web.mit.edu/mitworld/.
Publications
ITC researchers and affiliates published or presented research widely. Highlights include the following:
- Ansolabehere, Stephen, John M. de Figueiredo and James M. Snyder Jr., "Why is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?" October 2002.
- Clark, D., S. Gillett, W. Lehr, M. Sirbu, J. Fountain, "Local Government Stimulation of Broadband: Effectiveness, E-Government, and Economic Development."
- J. Wroclawski, K. Sollins, R. Braden, "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet." Presented at ACM SIGCOMM 2002.
- Faratin, P., J. Wroclawski, G. Lee, and S. Parsons, "The Personal Router: An Agent for Wireless Access." October 2002.
- Lehr, William, and Lee McKnight, "Wireless Internet Access: 3G vs. WiFi?" Telecommunications Policy, 2003.
- Rodriguez Casal, Carlos, "Regulating Spam: Opting In or Opting Out? August 2002.
- "A Contribution to the Understanding of Illegal Copying of Software: Empirical and Analytical Evidence Against Conventional Wisdom," Working Paper, June 2002.
- Shin, Seung-Jae, and Hector Correa and Martin Weiss. "A Game Theoretic Modeling and Analysis for Internet Access Market," ITS-14, Seoul, Korea, August 2002.
- Weiss, Martin, and SeungJae Shin. "Internet Interconnection Economic Model and its Analysis: Peering and Settlement," 17th World Computer Congress, Montreal, Canada, August 2002.
ITC affiliates presented seven papers at TPRC 2002, Alexandria, VA, September 28-29, 2002:
- David Gabel, "Why is There So Little Competition in the Provision of Local Telecommunications Services?"
- Kanchana, Wanichkorn, Marvin Sirbu, "The Role of Wireless Access Networks in the Deployment of Broadband Services and Competition in Local Telecommunications Market."
- Lehr, William, Uncials Merino, and Sharon Gillett, "Software Radio: Implications for Wireless Services, Industry Structure, and Public Policy."
- Martin B., H. Weiss, and SeungJae Shin, "A Simulation Approach for Internet Quos Market Analysis."
- McKnight, Lee W., Paul M. Valero, and Raul L. Katz, "Innovation and Creative Destruction in Emerging Markets: The Impact of State Commitments on Privatizing Telecoms"
- McKnight, Lee W., Diana Animus, and Moslem Usurer, "Virtual Markets in Wireless Grids: Peering Policy Obstacles."
- O'Donnell, Shawn, "An Economic Map of the Internet."
Dr. David Clark, senior research scientist at the Lab for Computer Science, directs ITC. Sharon Eisner Gillett is executive director; William Lehr, associate director.
More information about ITC, including student theses, can be found on the web at http://itc.mit.edu/.
Program on Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy
The Program on Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (P-STEP) is an MIT initiative aimed at working with the US Environmental Protection Agency and industry representatives to improve environmental regulation and performance through research, education, and outreach. P-STEP gathered industry representatives and area researchers at MIT in 2001 to discuss core principles through a workshop titled, "Environmental Risk Management for the 21st Century."
The program, jointly sponsored by the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and CTPID, aims to promote innovation on three levels:
- Development of improved analytic approaches and methods for risk assessment and regulatory instrument design
- Development and diffusion of new risk mitigation technologies
- Communication methods for informing policy makers about the nature of the environmental risk and cost-effective means for reducing them
The P-STEP research team includes CTPID director, Fred Moavenzadeh; Materials Systems Lab principal investigator, Joel P. Clark; and Frank Field III, CTPID senior research engineer. For more information, contact the codirectors: Thomas Eager tweagar@mit.edu or Joanne Kauffman jmkauffm@mit.edu.
More information about P-STEP can be found on the web at http://p-step.mit.edu/.
Technology and Law Program
The Technology and Law (T&L) Program offers research opportunities and graduate-level courses focusing on the interface of law and technology. Research activities include the design and evaluation of policies that encourage technological change for preventing chemical pollution through regulation, liability, and economic incentives; the promotion of environmental justice by involving communities in governmental decisions that affect their health, safety, and environment; and addressing the effects of globalization on sustainability.
T&L offers a two-semester sequence in environmental law and policy colisted with Urban Studies: Law; Technology, and Public Policy, a core subject in the Technology and Policy Program; and Sustainability, Trade, and Environment, listed jointly with Engineering and Sloan. This year, the latter course was offered at Cambridge, England as part of the Cambridge-MIT Institute.
Recent Publications include:
- Ashford, N. A. "Pathways to Sustainability: Evolution or Revolution?" in Innovation and Regional Development in the Network Society, Marina van Genuine, David V. Gibson, and Manuel V. Heritor (eds.), Series on "Technology Policy and Innovation," Volume 7. 2002 (http://in3.dem.ist.utl.pt/istpi/).
- Ashford, N. A. "Technology-Focused Regulatory Approaches for Encouraging Sustainable Industrial Transformations: Beyond Green, Beyond the Dinosaurs, and Beyond Evolutionary Theory," Presented at the 3rd Blueprint Workshop on Instruments for Integrating Environmental and Innovation Policy, September 16–27, 2002, Brussels.
- Ashford, N. A. "Major Challenges to Engineering Education for Sustainable Development: What Has to Change to Make It Creative, Effective, and Acceptable to the Established Disciplines," Presented at the Conference on Engineering Education in Sustainable Development, October 24-25, 2002, Delft, The Netherlands.
- S. S. Epstein, N. A. Ashford, B. Black welder, G. Cohen, E. Goldsmith, A. Masochist, and Q. D. Young, "The Crisis in U.S. and International Cancer Policy," International Journal of Health Services, 2002.
- Zwetsloot G. and N. A. Ashford, "Inherently Safer Production, A Natural Complement to Cleaner Production," Zwetsloot G. and N. A. Ashford (2002), Industry and Environment, UN Environmental Programme, Paris.
- "Public Participation in Contaminated Communities" now available as a PDF at http://web.mit.edu/ctpid/www/tl/TL-pub-PPCC.html.
- Technology and Policy professor Nicholas Ashford is director.
More information about T&L can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/ctpid/www/tl/.
Center for Transportation and Logistics
Established in 1973 to develop and coordinate the wide range of transportation-related activity at MIT, CTL provides a focal point for transportation education, facilitates transportation research, conducts an outreach program to the transportation industry, and encourages a sense of common purpose among the many departments, centers and laboratories involved in transportation and logistics at MIT.
At the end of June, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) relocated its headquarters to the east side of MIT's campus, as part of the ongoing administrative restructuring in the School of Engineering. It is now physically situated in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD), where it has been situated administratively for five years.
Education
Master of Engineering in Logistics Program and Master of Science in Transportation
Twenty-nine new students arrived on campus this fall to enter the CTL's Master of Engineering in Logistics program, an intensive nine-month degree track preparing graduates for logistics management careers in manufacturing, distribution, retail, transportation and logistics organizations.
Again this year, because of the high quality of applications, qualifying for graduate admission for transportation studies was increasingly difficult. This year, 261 applications were received for graduate studies in transportation—including the Master of Science in Transportation (MST), the Master of Engineering in Logistics (MLOG) and the PhD programs—and 100 students were enrolled in 2002–2003. Funding was found for 63 percent of the students.
Major New Projects
The Supply Chain Education Partners Program ('Partners') was established in 2002 to engage local companies together with MIT's Master of Engineering in Logistics (MLOG) students' theses with the intention of practitioner-based thesis work that will result in knowledge creation and sharing. The program facilitates interaction through thesis projects, executive education, knowledge-sharing events and networking. The Partners Program was successful in its first year of operation with five sponsoring companies supporting students' theses.
Meetings and Conferences
Hosted by the Transportation and Logistics Student Group, this year's Distinguished Speaker Series featured the following: October 4, Dr. Ian Savage, Northwestern University Department of Economics: Trends in Transportation Employee Injuries Since Economic Deregulation; October 11, Jose Izquierdo, secretary, Department of Transportation and Public Works, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico; October 18, Mary Murphy-Hoye, director, IT strategy and technology, Intel: Transitioning from Capacity-Based Management to Demand-Based Management; October 25, Kern Jacobson, senior vice president and central region manager, Jacobs Civil, Inc: The Business of Consulting Engineering: How to Profit (or Not); November 8, John Wiehoff, CEO, and Chad Lindbloom, CFO, CH Robinson Worldwide, Inc: The Freight Brokerage Business; November 22, Lynn Ahlgren, Cambridge Systematics: Making Tracks: Economic Development and Current Planning for High Speed Rail between Boston and Montreal; February 7, Michael E. Levine, professor (adjunct) of law, Yale University: Looking Ahead: The Future of the US Airline Industry; February 14, Michael Pollitt, senior lecturer in business economics, Cambridge University, UK: The Restructuring and Privatization of British Rail: Was it Really That Bad?; February 21, Michael Shiffer, vice president, planning and development, Chicago Transit Authority; associate professor (on leave), University of Illinois, Chicago: Leveraging Technology to Reshape Transportation Planning; March 14, Hans-Jurgen Sebastian, Department of Operations Research and Logistics Management, Aachen University, Germany: Strategic/Tactical Planning of Multimodal Networks in Freight Transportation; April 4, Mortimer Downey III, principal consultant, PB Consult; former deputy secretary, US Department of Transportation: The Federal Legislative Process for 2003: Will There Be a TEA-3 and an AIR-2, and What Might They Be?; April 25, Mysore Nagaraja, senior VP and chief engineer, MIT New York City Transit: The Great Comeback: Rebuilding the New York Subway System after 9/11.
On January 14, our annual two-hour gathering for alumni, students, faculty, and friends of the center was held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel during the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. On February 3, a gathering was held for students, faculty, staff ,and friends of the center to start the new semester. On March 14, the first in a series of information sessions was held for students interested in careers in transportation; representatives from the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center were on hand to discuss opportunities in transportation engineering, planning, and policy analysis.
Personnel Changes
Yossi Sheffi was on sabbatical leave this year in Cambridge University. He worked with faculty both at the Judge Institute of Management and the Engineering Department there. His work resulted in several papers in the areas of combinatorial auction theory and in the use of RFID tags for supply chain management. He came back in early February and managed the transition of the MLOG leadership as well as to negotiate the MIT side of a large contract with Spain which CTL obtained in July.
Jane Garvey, former head of both the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Highway Administration, was appointed a senior lecturer at the center. She is part of the faculty team teaching The Airline Industry, an overview of the global airline industry, and assisting in the teaching of Fred Salvucci's Urban Transportation Planning, which covers the history, policy, and politics of urban transportation. She is also organizing a seminar on transportation policy.
MIT alumnus Christopher Caplice (PhD '96, Transportation and Logistics Systems) was appointed the new director of MIT's Master of Engineering in Logistics Program. Caplice succeeds Jim Masters, director of the program since its founding in 1998, who left MIT to become a senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh.
A. Scheffer Lang, a founding member of the center, died at home in St. Paul, MN, on January 14 after a long battle with cancer. He was 75. Known as "Shef," Lang earned the SB (1949) and SM (1961) in civil engineering from MIT and served on the faculty from 1956–1961. He returned in 1969 as a visiting professor, directing transportation activities in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and became a professor the next year. The Center for Transportation Studies (now the Center for Transportation and Logistics) was created in 1973.
In September, Jonathan Fleck, a 2000 graduate of MIT's Master of Engineering in Logistics Program, returned to campus to help establish a new program—the MIT Supply Chain Education Partners Program—and a new research initiative into global terrorism and its effects on supply chain management. With Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program (ISCM), Fleck also co-taught ESD.262J Supply Chain Context, a half-semester course for MLOG students, and helped out with the center's Affiliates Program in Logistics. Fleck left the center in June.
On June 30, 2003, Cynthia Barnhart resigned as CTL codirector to go on to head one of the major activities in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
Recognition
Carl Van Dyke, (MSCE'81) was honored as part of the team that won the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The internationally-recognized award is presented each year by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), an international society dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management and operations. The Edelman best cases competition recognizes outstanding examples of projects that change organizations and people's lives. The second place team in the competition included Cynthia Barnhart, codirector of the center.
Joan Walker, graduate of MIT's doctoral program in transportation systems, was awarded the 2001 Eric Pas Dissertation Prize in Travel Behavior Research. Walker's thesis—"Extended Discrete Choice Models: Integrated Framework, Flexible Error Structures, and Latent Variables"—was recognized for its outstanding contribution to this area of study. She also received first prize for her dissertation in 2001 from the Transportation Science Section of the Institute for Operations and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Michelle Karow (MST'03) was awarded the $3000 Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship, established in 1981 by the Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS) to encourage women to pursue career paths in transportation. Named for the first executive secretary of WTS, the scholarship is awarded to women pursuing graduate studies in transportation or a related field, based on the applicant's specific transportation involvement and goals, job skills and academic record.
Ralph Hall, a Technology, Management, and Policy PhD candidate in the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, was awarded the prestigious Wootan Memorial Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) for his research in the area of transportation policy and planning. Hall's thesis advisor was Joseph Sussman, JR East professor and professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering systems.
New England University Transportation Center at MIT chose Nathanial Grier, a former master's student at MIT, as its UTC Outstanding Student of the Year 2003. Grier is currently an associate with the transportation planning and engineering firm Martin/Alexiou/Bryson of Raleigh NC. He holds a masters degree from MIT where his research, under the supervision of Professor Ismail Chabini, was in the area of dynamic traffic assignment. His work focused on the development of new solution approaches to the time-dependent shortest paths and the dynamic network loading problems. He also holds a bachelors degree in civil engineering from MIT.
The Council of Logistics Management presented the 2002 Doctoral Dissertation Award to Julie Swann for her thesis "Dynamic Pricing Models to Improve Supply Chain Performance." Swann was a visiting PhD student at MIT last year in ESD—on leave from Northwestern, which awarded her degree. Her thesis advisor was David Simchi-Levi, professor of engineering systems and of civil and environmental engineering.
Research
During the past academic year, a host of new research projects were posted on our web site, along with scores of continuing projects carried over from previous years—a total of more than 100 efforts listed in various categories and cross-indexed with their principal researchers. Many of those entries were research programs which included within them still more individual projects.
Major New Projects
Jim Rice of CTL and Dr. Jim Hines of Sloan System Dynamics Group received a $70K grant from Intel to support their research in applying system dynamics models to supply chain problems. Additionally, Intel gifted to Jim Rice approximately $30K of computers for use by students on research projects he is leading.
Major Meetings and Conferences
On October 16–17, an affiliates seminar was held jointly with the MIT Auto-ID Center to explore the potential of Auto-ID technologies and their application to transportation and logistics. The agenda included a review of the fundamentals of Auto-ID technology as a basis for the discussion about future applications.
On December 5, an affiliates seminar was held jointly with the Industrial Liaison Program and the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program to explore the impact of terrorism and other unexpected disruptions on the supply chain. Center director Yossi Sheffi led the session along with representatives from industry, government, and academia, including representatives from Intel, United Parcel Service, British Telecom, and Accenture.
On June 19th the center held a similar event in the UK with participation of many leading European companies and representatives of the UK Government.
On January 30, a seminar, Modeling the Al Qaeda Threat, was held featuring Dr. Gordon Woo, Catastrophe Consultant, Risk Management Solutions. Dr. Woo, a specialist in the mathematical aspects of insurance risk modeling, has focused since 9/11 on quantifying terrorism risk; his talk reviewed a range of concepts that allowed the Al Qaeda threat to be modeled mathematically. Presented in conjunction with the research initiative Supply Chain Response to Terrorism.
More than forty people convened at MIT April 29 for a day-long symposium on Freight Lane and Supply Chain Security sponsored by the center's Affiliates Program in Logistics. The group included representatives from shippers, carriers, security firms, insurers, third-party logistics providers, the government, and academia, all gathered together to identify current best practice, new technologies, and key issues for the future. The day was comprised of morning presentations on the state-of-the-art, and afternoon workshop discussions focused on standards of care, measuring and reporting, investigation and follow-up, and how to develop a collaborative response from industry to improve overall system performance.
More than 100 participants from the US and Canada came to MIT to attend the symposium on the Driving Decision: Health, Safety and the Older Driver to hear the results and discuss the implications of a national AgeLab study sponsored by The Hartford Financial Services Company to understand the current and future mobility patterns of the 50+ population. In addition to releasing the results of the first national survey of its kind, researchers from around the nation were invited to discuss the role, cost, and future issues associated with health, happiness, and mobility in an aging society. The event was held as part of National Transportation Week during National Older Americans Month.
More than 40 executives from a range of industries convened at MIT on May 28 for the symposium on Supply Chain Value Creation: Finance Meets Supply Chain. This event was an open exchange on ways to measure the value of supply chain activities to business, and was motivated by the recently evident new role for the supply chain as driver of economic activity.
Affiliates Program in Logistics
The Affiliates Program in Logistics was established in 1981 to develop relationships between MIT and the private sector transportation and logistics industries. The program helps support research that is of particular interest to private sector organizations and which contributes significantly to improved educational programs for private sector management. The Affiliates Program serves its members through a series of symposiums that cover a broad expanse of critical leading edge topics and issues for companies that ship and carry products and materials. On September 5–6, 2002 the annual Affiliates Day was held at Unilever in Atlanta GA. The two-day visit explored the role of alliances and outsourcing in the supply chain. The meeting featured Unilever COO Alan Jope, MIT's Charlie Fine and Yossi Sheffi, among others. The 2003 annual Affiliates Day will be hosted by Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NJ and will focus on the evolution of supply chain organizations. The meeting will feature Lucent CEO Pat Russo, Lucent SCN President Jose Mejia and MIT's Jim Hines, among others.
Integrated Supply Chain Management Program
Since its inception in FY1995, the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program has maintained a small but solid set of sponsors, now including Avaya, Helix Technology, Intel Corporation, Leica Microsystems, Lucent Technologies, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, and Texas Instruments. The consortium has been productive in funding research over the course of its eight years of operation, with most recent funding supporting the Supply Chain Visualization project, Professor Charles Fine (supply chain design), Professor de Neufville (real options in the supply chain) as well as CTL research in supply chain management and supply chain response to terrorism. The consortium has recently included events that brought sponsors together to understand how finance and supply chain management interact, as well as how supply chains respond to terrorism.
Professional Education
Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management, a two and a half day introduction to this increasingly crucial profession, was offered January 5–7; Supply Chain Management: Thought Leadership, our annual week-long summer program, was offered June 22–25.
Personnel Changes
On June 30, 2003, Cynthia Barnhart resigned as CTL codirector to go on to head one of the major activities in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Tiauw Go, Tomer Toledo, and Bryan Reimer joined the center's research staff this year, and Janet Kerrigan left CTL to join CEE.
Recognition
The University Transportation Centers Program of New England, headquartered at MIT, was featured in the May/June issue of Public Roads Magazine, the bimonthly magazine of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Along with information on research at other centers around the country, the article focused on the work being done in Region One to maximize mobility by increasing accessibility of transportation to all populations, including the elderly.
Joseph Coughlin, founder of the MIT AgeLab, was honored with a Telly Award—among the most sought-after awards in the TV, commercial and business education video industry—for his research and presentation of One in Four: Strategic Business Innovation for a Global, Aging Market. Produced for EDS, a founding sponsor of the MIT AgeLab, and produced by WatchIT, One in Four explores what it means for businesses to operate in a world where one in four people is an older adult.
Designing and Managing the Supply Chain, by Professor David Simchi-Levi (with Philip Kaminsky of Berkeley and Edith Simchi-Levi of LogicTools) was released in an enhanced second edition by McGraw-Hill. Originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1999, the book received the Book-of-the-Year Award and the Outstanding IIE Publication Award given in 2000 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers. It also received the Outstanding First Edition of the Year Award from McGraw-Hill, and was selected by Business 2.0, December 2001 issue, as the "best source for slashing time and cost and increasing productivity in the supply chain." It has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Thomas Sheridan, Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus, published a new book exploring critical issues surrounding human-automation systems, from design to control and performance of both humans and machines. Humans and Automation: System Design and Research Issues (2002: John Wiley & Sons) introduces system designers and engineers to the relations between human operators or users and the ever-increasing automation in the transportation industry—in aviation, rail and highways—as well as in the chemical process, communication and manufacturing industries, health care, and other fields.
Richard de Neufville and Amedeo Odoni, internationally recognized as expert airport researchers and consultants, published a new book on the planning, design and management of airport systems. Released by McGraw-Hill Professional, Airport Systems Planning, Design, and Management is considered likely to become a standard reference in the field. Comprehensive and international in scope, the 900-page textbook takes a systems-level view of issues currently facing airport managers, operators and planners. It offers state-of-the-art approaches to such concerns as the design of passenger terminals and airfields, the expansion of facilities, the management of traffic and mitigation of environmental impacts, the financing of large-scale projects and the potential privatization of some or all airport functions.
More information about the Center for Transportation & Logistics can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/ctl/.
Industrial Performance Center
The MIT Industrial Performance Center (IPC) is dedicated to the study of industries in the United States and in other advanced economies. The center brings together the intellectual resources of MIT in a search for fresh insights into the nature and origins of successful industrial performance. Through our research we seek to help leaders in business, labor, government, and the universities better understand global industrial development and to work with them to develop practical new approaches for strengthening public policies, business strategies, technical practices, and educational programs. With the participation of about 30 faculty members and more than 50 students from the Schools of Engineering; Management; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; and Architecture and Planning, the center today serves as a listening post on industry, monitoring and interpreting industrial trends, techniques, and patterns of organization.
Relocation
In April 2003, the IPC moved its operations out of E40 and into 1,000 square feet of newly renovated space in E38. The new offices house eight graduate students, the headquarters staff, and visiting faculty.
Research Highlights
The center's research is organized around three major themes: Technology and the Changing American Workplace; Systems and Strategies for Innovation; and Globalization and its Implications for Industries and Societies.
This year the center launched a major new research program on Local Innovation Systems. An international team of researchers led by Professor Richard Lester is studying the conditions of innovation in selected industries in more than a dozen regions around the world, including locations in the United States, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, Ireland, and Israel. A particular focus is on the role of research universities as contributors to innovation and economic growth in these regions. The team includes researchers from the University of Tampere, Helsinki University of Technology, and the University of Tokyo as well as the IPC, and is sponsored by government agencies in several countries.
The center continues its studies of globalization. The term "globalization" refers to the set of changes in the international economy that are tending towards the creation of a single world market for capital, goods, and services. In each of these dimensions, globalization raises new challenges for sustaining innovation, growth, societal well being, and broad political legitimacy in the nations it encompasses. The IPC Globalization Study focuses on one aspect of these developments: the fragmentation of the production systems of firms in the advanced economies, and the relocation of parts of these enterprises to other societies. Research on this topic is currently underway in the United States, Europe, Japan, Mexico, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Latin America. The IPC Globalization Study team is led by Professor Suzanne Berger (Political Science), and also includes Professors Tayo Akinwande (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science [EECS]), Don Lessard (Sloan), Richard Lester (Nuclear Engineering), Charles Sodini (EECS), Edward Steinfeld (Sloan), IPC research associate Tim Sturgeon, and several doctoral students, and also includes research affiliates from Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. As part of this research, a World Bank-sponsored study of East Asian supply chains in the electronics, automobile, and apparel industries was conducted by Professor Richard Lester, Dr. Tim Sturgeon, and several IPC graduate students.
This year the IPC received a founding grant from the Hewlett Foundation for a second research initiative related to globalization. The Globalization, Economic Development, and Standards project focuses on the investment and contracting practices of multi-national corporations in emerging economies, the implications of these practices for sustainable economic development, and the role of labor and environmental standards and related codes of conduct. The research is led by Professor Richard Locke (Sloan and Political Science), and participating faculty include Professors Joshua Cohen (Political Science), Thomas Kochan (Sloan), Robert McKersie (Sloan), Michael Piore (Economics), Dara O'Rourke (Urban Studies and Planning), Judith Tendler (Urban Studies and Planning), and Balakrishnan Rajagopal (Urban Studies and Planning).
People
Visitors to the IPC this year included Patrick Le Quement, Senior Vice President for Corporate Design at Renault, who delivered a series of lectures and seminars on creativity in design and management; Professor Alok Chakrabarti, founding dean of the School of Management at New Jersey Institute of Technology, who held a Sloan Industries Fellowship at the center for 2001–2002, and Ms. Helene Grela, of the Institute d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, who conducted research on outsourcing in the automobile industry.
Professor Suzanne Berger was visiting professor at Ecole Polytechnique and at Sciences Po in Paris in 2001–2002 and presented lectures on globalization at several leading universities throughout Europe. Her book based on these lectures, "Le Première Mondialisation", will shortly be published by Editions du Seuil.
During academic year 2001–2002 the center awarded three new IPC doctoral fellowships. Raja Shankar received a fellowship to pursue his research on "Economic Development through Local Knowledge Accumulation: A Study of the Indian Software Industry." Sarah Kaplan was awarded a fellowship to carry out her research on "How Firms Make Strategy in Periods of High Technological Uncertainty." Xudong Gao received a fellowship to pursue his research on "Explaining Different Patterns of Technological Capability Development in China's Electronics Industries." Also this year, IPC doctoral student Douglas Fuller was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue his research on innovation and industrialization in China and Taiwan; and IPC doctoral student Carlos Martinez-Vela received a Martin Fellowship in Sustainable Development.
More information on the Industrial Performance Center can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/ipc/www/.