For devising a template that could help address common manufacturing problems, a faculty member from the Technological Institute of the Philippines (T.I.P.) was awarded first place in a recently concluded doctoral dissertation competition held in Sydney, Australia.
Engr. Ma. Teodora Gutierrez, an assistant professor under the Industrial Engineering Department of T.I.P. Quezon City, submitted her latest paper titled “A Model for Production Possibility Frontier of an Enterprise Using Multi-Objective Optimization Approach.”
Gutierrez’s win at the Australian conference of the IEOM Society is her first international recognition. IEOM Society is a non-profit global organization “dedicated to the advancement of industrial engineering and operations management discipline for the betterment of humanity.”
Her work topped the doctoral dissertation category out of eight other research projects presented in person and online in that division at the First Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM) Conference in Sydney, Australia last December 20 to 22, 2022.
Gutierrez said her goal was to help her case study, a steel company based in the Philippines, find optimum solutions that would somehow make it easier for operations managers to minimize production costs and wastes subject to the availability of resources.
“I came up with this study to formulate a model for this particular company using their data and solved (a problem) using the operation research technique. So, this one is more complex because there are tradeoffs,” she noted.
Gutierrez was referring to the seemingly contradictory approach of doing more with less to increase productivity. In theory, she said, this can be done by achieving what is called a ‘pareto optimal solution’ to meet multiple objectives.
‘Pareto optimality’ or ‘pareto efficiency’ is a concept commonly used in economics to describe a scenario in which resources are allocated in the most efficient way possible without making one side of the equation better off or worse than the others.
The 21-year faculty member presented her paper virtually. She has been working on this problem as part of her Doctor of Engineering in Engineering Management studies at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) in Manila.
Gutierrez’s win at the Australian conference of the IEOM Society is her first international recognition. IEOM Society is a non-profit global organization “dedicated to the advancement of industrial engineering and operations management discipline for the betterment of humanity.”
Prior to this achievement, Gutierrez has done research on improving productivity in a semiconductor subcontracting company and worked with other researchers on a solution to decongest the Manila Port using model simulation, among other studies.
