Trends and Proposals for European Industrial Engineering

Abstract

This article analyses the trends in scientific publications (Web of Science) in the field of industrial engineering (IE) from 1950 to the present. Specifically, it presents the evolution of the emergence of ‘concepts’ associated with IE for decades, their quantitative or qualitative nature and the prominence of the different world regions in their origin. The analysis reveals a decline in the capacity of the academe and the industry to propose new ‘concepts’ during the last 20 years, a considerable variation of the leading role of world regions in IE and significant changes in the preponderance of IE ‘concepts’ with a quantitative or qualitative character. To foster the capacity of the IE academe in contributing to European industrial development, the transformations that the industry will have to face during the next decades are proposed as areas of development of the research activity. Enhancing training and research on the consequences of digitisation on industrial management, enlarging the optimization scope from company to value chain and industrial ecosystems and prioritizing research aimed at developing new ‘concepts’, methodologies and tools are suggested as some of the future paths for IE.