Manufacturing, Trade, and Logistics
Manufacturing creates both wealth and high-quality jobs, and is responsible for 70 percent of US exports. In support of this key industrial area, Georgia Tech conducts basic and applied research in manufacturing, trade, and logistics—supplemented by strengths in related research disciplines such as materials and management. This multidisciplinary focus allows industrial sponsors to tap into comprehensive expertise, ranging from manufacturing processes and factory automation to supply chain management and enterprise transformation. Sponsors also benefit from Georgia Tech's experience helping research innovations move from from the lab to the marketplace, resulting in new commercial products.
Central to this effort is the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, which is creating “collaboratories” that serve as innovation pilot plants and prototype shops. These collaboratories bring together specialists from academia, industry, and government to collaborate on technologies such as additive manufacturing, sustainable design and production, precision machining, factory information, model-based systems engineering, advanced composites, nanotechnologies, and robotics and automation. The collaboratories serve as idea incubators, technology-proving grounds, and workforce training centers, which all represent the physical embodiment of an innovation ecosystem. They also help train a new generation of graduates who will help companies apply these cutting-edge manufacturing techniques.
Researchers in Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture
are helping automate the process of turning CAD designs
into manufactured products. Here, professor Tristan
Al-Haddad and undergraduate students Sam Kim and
Patrick di Rito are evaluating custom wall structures
manufactured using a new process. (Credit: Gary Meek)
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Georgia Tech’s performance-centered logistics research delivers quality information to decision makers in all parts of the supply chain. These systems utilize integrated and remote sensors, information systems, and wireless communications to ensure accurate and timely information that impacts supply chain strategy, warehousing and distribution, global transportation, resource scheduling, and health and humanitarian logistics.
On a national level, Georgia Tech is providing leadership through the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), a national manufacturing initiative designed to help US companies improve cost, quality, and speed of production to remain globally competitive. Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson serves on the partnership’s steering committee, collaborating with the nation’s top industry, government, and higher-education leaders.
Georgia Tech is home to some of the best engineering, manufacturing, and logistics programs in the world. By taking advantage of the synergy that exists in this innovation ecosystem and working closely with industry and government, Georgia Tech is leading the drive toward a “manufacturing renaissance.” Utilizing these advanced manufacturing technologies, companies partnering with Georgia Tech gain a competitive edge based on proprietary design, superior supply chain, and personalized post-sale services.
