Center for Industrial Mathematics and Statistics

We can help at any stage of a project or a program …

Investigation: Picking the right concept or the best process design can save your company money upfront and avoid missteps down the line. By developing relevant mathematical and statistical models, we can help you investigate and weigh product options at a lower cost and with less risk.

Analysis: Many of our corporate partners have collected large pools of data, but do not have the time or resources to interpret the data to reach informed decisions. We will use our developed models to help analyze your data to uncover useful or important patterns.

REU 2015: SSgA team in Boston.

Acceleration: Time to market is often an issue for our corporate partners. If a particularly difficult problem is stalling your progress, industrial mathematics can provide the insights to overcome roadblocks and accelerate your project schedule.

Optimization: Optimization is a key requirement for many of our corporate projects. CIMS can help you identify the best way to reduce costs, improve process efficiency, and refine or enhance product or service performance.

Projects@WPI

A track record of success: Companies and institutions that partner with CIMS know that they are working with an experienced team. We also use a systematic process and methodology that your team will appreciate for its discipline and results. Your CIMS team will work collaboratively with your team form project formulation to final deliverable

Experience that can expedite the right answers: The breadth and depth of experience at CIMS can benefit your program. There are often mathematical commonalities between seemingly unrelated studies. Our ability to make those connections helps us find the best approach to solve your problem. CIMS is recognized for our expertise in actuarial mathematics, applied statistics, financial mathematics, computational methods, and industrial mathematics.

Hands-on faculty involvement: The faculty at CIMS does not just direct students — they are an integral part of your project team. You will work with experienced industrial mathematicians as well as top-caliber students.

Continuity for multi-year or multi-generational projects: As a standing center for industry at WPI, CIMS can provide continuity that corporate sponsors value. Many partners have worked with us for several years on new generations of the same program or a succession of new projects. This continuity can reduce start-up time and accelerate results.

Industrial Project Logistics

The Center brings faculty members and technical experts from the company together to review the range of problems the company faces and develop appropriate project opportunities. Together, this group defines and refines the problem statement, discusses possible attacks on the problem, and determines the goals of and a schedule for the project.

Industrial projects can be organized in a wide variety of forms, depending on the difficulty of the project, level of funding, and the time frame required by the industrial partner. Possible options include:

One-year projects for undergraduate students

One-semester or one-year projects for Master of Science students in Industrial Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Financial Mathematics or Applied Statistics

One-semester internship projects for Ph.D. students

Two-year projects for post-doctoral fellows

Short and long-term research projects for faculty

Summer internships for undergraduate and graduate students

In the case of undergraduate and graduate level projects, the faculty members recruit students with appropriate background. The team makes regular progress reports to the company, working with the company to refine the problem statement as progress is made. The final results of the project are made available to the company in a written report, an oral presentation and, depending on the nature of the project, software or other mathematical tools that can be of long-term use.