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Production Control of Manufacturing Systems (PCMS) Laboratory

Professors Michael Caramanis, Jian-Qiang Hu, James R. Perkins, Pirooz Vakili, I. Paschalidis
15 St. Mary's Street, Room 143
Phone: 617/353-4209

The PCMS laboratory is dedicated to research on the control and design of manufacturing systems. Algorithmic development for dynamic scheduling, stability and performance evaluation, design, and planning of production systems is a major research activity. Development of a framework that facilitates concurrent manufacturing through cooperation of independent decision-making entities in a manufacturing facility is an equally important research goal of the PCMS laboratory. This effort includes theoretical research on complex system decomposition and coordination, as well as applied work on software architectures and interfaces. Resources include a mixed platform of PCs and workstations available in the laboratory, as well as campuswide computational facilities, including Boston University's SGI's Power Challenge Array which replaced the Connection Machine (CM-5) in 1995. Several supercomputing machines later, starting in June 2003 "friendly users" will have access to the new IBM p690 cluster. The PCMS laboratory is the home of graduate students primarily, but not exclusively, at the doctoral level and has established collaborative projects with a number of industrial sites.