This collaborative project between faculty in Chemical Engineering and Economics addresses significant issues that chemical engineering students face upon entrance into the workforce (decision making under uncertainty, managing risk etc.) which are often not covered in curricula or textbooks for engineering design or engineering economics. Such challenges include (a) the management and operation of companies and plants under conditions of extreme uncertainty (due to natural disasters, international disputes, terrorism and vulnerable energy supply), (b) the move by major corporations towards the production of specialty products with high profit margins instead of commodities and chemicals, (c) the formulation of new interdisciplinary areas of professional activity, such as product design, and (d) the expected development of new products that utilize technological breakthroughs (e.g., nanotechnology, renewable energy). The project is using modern developments in Economics to address these challenges with well developed tools, such as decision theory, risk analysis, forecasting analysis, price theory etc. At the same time, analysis and simulation techniques that are being used commonly in Chemical Engineering are being utilized in this project to provide a fresh perspective for the advancement of several areas of Industrial Organization and Microeconomics.
The project is accomplishing four specific objectives: (a) integrating modern economics techniques into the teaching of Engineering Design; (b) transferring analysis techniques from Chemical Engineering to Microeconomics; (c) developing illustrative classroom experiments and case studies that showcase the above and can be used in existing and in new classes; (d) assessing and improving the classroom experiments and the learning material developed throughout the project.
Completion of this project is impacting the curricula in two disciplines, with the incorporation of new material in existing classes and with the creation of material for a new interdisciplinary class. In addition, the learning material generated through this project is being made available to the community through a web server. Evaluation of the project results is being conducted in peer institutions with the use of the beta versions.
