University-industry collaboration in engineering systems research: The case of cost modeling

This paper suggests that the university-industry collaborative research model is a particularly profitable one when applied to problems in engineering systems research. In particular, this approach to research sets up an environment where the major gaps in skills and data of both academics and industry can, in a complementary fashion, be aligned to devise a research team that is well-suited to tackling these problems. Although the field of engineering systems is a relatively new one, it can be instructive to explore research problems that share the features of engineering systems problems that have been already undertaken to illustrate the benefits of these complementary features, as well as to explore how best to characterize future opportunities. This paper describes one such set of collaborations between steel-making firms and researchers from the MIT Materials Systems Laboratory. In particular, it explores the modeling of production cost, an emergent property of a complex engineering system. Despite its obvious relevance throughout the product development cycle, cost modeling analysis has not been a major area of engineering research. Successful research in this area has been largely achieved through university-industry research collaboration, and this success suggests that there are other opportunities in the engineering systems research area.