Fostering interdisciplinary integration in engineering management

Abstract

Research in the challenging field of industrial engineering and engineering management often needs the expertise from more than one discipline. Various disciplinary competences have to be combined to answer research questions and to solve specific (engineering) problems at the interfaces of different professional disciplines. The disciplines being part of the research and problem solving process have to be consequently integrated to form an efficiently performing interdisciplinary consortium. Current research states that this interdisciplinary integration process has to include various dimensions. This paper introduces three sets of interdisciplinary integration methods. Together they cover all of the dimensions explained before and lead to an enhanced interdisciplinary integration. Having just implemented a set of integration methods, measurement methods are adjusted to evaluate and optimize them continually.