Introduction to Manufacturing Systems
Manufacturing systems analyzed through material flow, storage, information flow, capacities, and timing of events. MIT OpenCourseWare materials cover probability, inventory and queuing models, optimization, and linear and dynamic systems as tools for understanding factory behavior. Factory planning and scheduling sections address flow planning, bottleneck characterization, buffer and batch-size analysis, and the dynamic behavior of production systems. The course is built for mechanical engineering students who need quantitative methods for designing and running production facilities, not just conceptual overviews. Materials include lecture notes, assignments, and problem sets typical of MIT OCW offerings, free to access with no certificate attached. It suits learners who already have some grounding in probability and systems analysis and want to apply it directly to factory-level decisions like where bottlenecks form and how buffers should be sized.