What Makes Industrial Engineering different from other engineering disciplines?
Fundamentally, Industrial Engineering has no basic physical science like mechanics, chemistry, or electricity. Also because a major component in any production system is people, Industrial Engineering has a person portion. At NC State, the human aspect is called ergonomics, although elsewhere it is called human factors. A more subtle difference between Industrial Engineering than other engineering disciplines is the concentration on discrete mathematics. IE’s deal with systems that are measured discretely, rather than metrics which are continuous.
