The IMSE Department at UT Arlington offers degrees in Industrial Engineering at the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. levels plus Masters degrees in Logistics, Engineering Management, and Systems Engineering. Since we only offer a doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering, students can focus their degree in areas of expertise such as Systems Engineering. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on one of those students and how she plans to apply her research to real-world needs.

Misagh Faezipour is a Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Engineering department with a focus in Systems Engineering. She is also affiliated with the System Engineering Research Center (SERC). She has worked as a graduate research assistant on multiple projects in the SERC and is currently a graduate teaching assistant at the IE department. Her research interests lie in the areas of engineering complex systems, healthcare, sustainability, simulation, systems thinking & systems dynamics. The focus of her current research is in Systems Engineering with an emphasis on sustainability related to Systems Engineering and applied to the healthcare domain. Her dissertation is related to addressing water sustainability in hospitals. System dynamics is applied as a modeling approach to provide a better understanding of the water sustainability considerations & model key factors and interrelationships involved in hospitals. A simulator is being developed that simulates the interactions of the key factors from the model. The simulator will help decision makers realize the impacts of their decisions made related to some key factors and also help then make informed decisions. The hospitals are the main stakeholder in this research, and the goal is to help them with their water management process and support them to make informed decisions.

UT Arlington’s Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) focuses on addressing complex and multi-faceted challenges that are rapidly evolving at the frontiers at world needs.

Clement Smartt is pursuing a PhD at UTA, with a focus in systems engineering, and is contributing to this SERC research goal. Clement is a Research Scientist with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and was previously a Principal Systems Engineer with L-3 Communications. Clement is also a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP). Clement Smartt has recently been selected to receive the 2012 INCOSE Foundation Stevens Doctoral Award. This important international award recognizes innovative doctoral research related to the field of Systems Engineering and is only given to one student per year. Criteria to be considered for this award includes an advancement of both the state-of-the knowledge as well as state-of-the-practice in systems engineering. Clement Smartt’s research seeks to determine an optimal use of systems engineering in proposal management by assessing the impact of systems engineering factors on contract award. The ability to capture contracts is key to survival for organizations that perform contract work. Systems engineering often plays a central role in proposal management by coordinating the technical effort. A decision support system (DSS) will be developed to generate empirically-based, quantitative recommendations that will help decision makers best allocate systems engineering resources on proposals.

As a result of this research, organizations that engineer systems will be able to more effectively use systems engineering in proposal management and provide better value to their customers.

Additional information about UTA’s SERC can be found at http://www.uta.edu/serc/.

Future blog entries will present more information about the SERC including research and researchers.