CELDi
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The National Science Foundation’s Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) recently formed an academic partnership with Lehigh University. The Center is hosted by the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in Mohler Lab. A driving force for this partnership is to increase cooperation between industry and academia, as well as the public and private sectors. This partnership strives to increase the U.S. competitive edge in the global marketplace. CELDi states its formal mission as: “Providing integrated solutions to the complex global logistics challenges facing U.S. industry.” At Lehigh University, the focus of CELDi is on logistics and distribution systems, which helps companies become more agile. Emphasis is on manufacturing plant logistics such as material handling, scheduling, lead-time reduction, and applications of information systems for operations management. In addition to Lehigh in the northeast, there are several other geographically dispersed academic partners and over twenty-four industry partners involved nationally.
Lehigh’s role in this partnership is to provide focused university research with an emphasis on the creation of new knowledge needed to solve logistics and distribution problems. Lehigh has experience with the multi-company and multi-disciplinary collaboration that is essential to the success of this new Center. Lehigh also has over a century of experience with engineering-business collaboration. Our University is a natural fit for a program such as CELDi, not only because of Lehigh’s longstanding history of collaborative partnerships, but also considering the success of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Enterprise Systems Center (ESC). The mission of the ESC is to “enable experience-based learning, help implement agile manufacturing systems, and conduct research driven by industry needs.” Since the goal of CELDi is to integrate education and industry, it meshes well with the industry-focused ESC. Dr. Emory W. Zimmers, professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is the director of the Enterprise Systems Center and was chosen as the director for Lehigh’s CELDi program because of his extensive experience in leading research and developmental programs that involve collaboration between academic and industrial sectors.
