Undergraduate students have access to a variety of computer equipment ranging from PCs to large mainframes. Computer laboratories are available to help students study applications of various manufacturing materials as well as solve time and motion problems encountered in industrial engineering. Below are descriptions of our specific laboratories:

CIM Laboratory
Over $550,000 worth of equipment has been installed in the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Laboratory of which approximately $350,000 was new in August 2000. It is the state-of-the-art automation equipment including a variety of industrial robots, a conveyor system, a local area network, a computer numerically controlled vertical machine center, mill and lathe, vision system, bar-code readers, SPC gauging system, flexible manufacturing stations, and programmable electronic controllers. This laboratory is designed to be highly portable so it can be easily reconfigured from a multiple station CIM line to a variety of flexible manufacturing cells thereby, providing multiple stations for different student groups to perform design laboratory work. The CIM lab also has one Pentium III 750MHz and 4 Pentium II 350MHz IBM compatible computer stations that are used to control the CIM equipment in various configurations and to run some of the computer aided manufacturing sofware packages. This lab provides students with many challenging design laboratory experiences.

CAD/CAM/CAE/QUALITY Laboratory
A computer laboratory equipped, with 13 Pentium III 750MHz machines is dedicated to computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), computer-aided engineering (CAE), and quality assurance concepts and principles covered in industrial engineering course work. This is a smart-class room with a full range of interactive multimedia equipment. The laboratory is also equipped with several state-of-the-art statistical, simulation, and CAD/CAM software packages including all of the Unigraphics System elements.

Human Factors/Teaching Laboratory
This is also a smart-class room with a full range of interactive multimedia equipment and is used as the primary teaching laboratory for most IME classes. Time-study data acquisition and computer interface devices were purchased in August 2000. In addtion, there are electronic and analog timing devices and the MTM-2 and MOST System instructional manuals, computerized work measurement and predetermined time systems software packages including MOST, CAT (Computer-Aided Timestudy), CAS (Computer-Aided work Sampling), and FAST (Fast Application of Standard Times).

A high quality digital video camera, time-lapse VCR, and a special effects VCR are used for methods and human factors engineering work. This video equipment and multi-media equipment are aslo used for electronic classroom teaching for presenting lectures, demonstrating/teaching software used in course work, and showing video tapes of modern manufacturing facilities and processes in action.