ISE 408: Design and Control of Production and Service Systems

Course overview

ISE 408 develops a general, quantitative understanding of the factors that govern manufacturing plants and service systems. Students connect production-control methods with the relationships among work-in-process inventory, throughput, cycle time, capacity, and variability.

Learning goals

Students learn to:

• Build and evaluate statistical forecasts, including forecast error and autocorrelation analysis.
• Apply inventory, material-requirements-planning, queueing, and production-control models.
• Analyze throughput, cycle time, and work-in-process in production and service systems.
• Quantify how limited capacity and stochastic variability affect system performance.
• Design and analyze lean systems using pull control, load leveling, and variability reduction.

Format and preparation

The course combines lectures, regular quizzes, quantitative problem sets, two midterm examinations, a cumulative final, and a team case study. Prerequisites are ISE 362, ST 371, and ISE 135.

Current students should use NC State WolfWare for official announcements, assignments, readings, and deadlines.

Schedule

Week	Date	Topic	Materials
1	Aug 17	Course introduction and factory dynamics
2	Aug 24	Deterministic inventory models
3	Aug 31	Newsvendor and base-stock models
4	Sep 7	Continuous-review inventory models
5	Sep 14	Material requirements planning
6	Sep 21	Theory of constraints, lean manufacturing, and push-pull systems
7	Sep 28	Review and first midterm
8	Oct 5	Process and flow variability
9	Oct 12	Process and flow variability
10	Oct 19	Process and flow variability
11	Oct 26	Demand forecasting and error metrics
12	Nov 2	Time-series forecasting
13	Nov 9	Review and second midterm
14	Nov 16	Forecasting and statistical regression
15	Nov 23	Forecasting and introductory machine learning
16	Nov 30	Course synthesis