The future of manufacturing systems engineering

Manufacturing systems engineering will be greatly affected by advances in technology, including cheaper, ubiquitous sensors, increasing computational speeds, the ability to hold more data and move it faster, and artificial intelligence. This paper discusses the importance of human involvement in the field, especially the role of intuition. The issues examined are the purposes of manufacturing systems engineering; the importance of intuition, and more generally, the role that humans play in the design and operations of manufacturing systems; the effects of new systems-related technologies; how analytical models help the development of intuition; how the use of generic software without intuition can lead to trouble; how intuition is needed to determined what data, and how much of it, is needed for a given purpose. It also describes some successful applications of manufacturing systems research and proposes an organisational structure for manufacturing systems groups.