AMS in Germany

 

Dr. Greg Arbuckle is leading a study abroad program at Reutlingen University in Germany.  WKU has a long-standing exchange partnership with Reutlingen University.  Primarily, this exchange has focused on international business.  However, this past spring, it was discovered that our Architectural and Manufacturing Science program (AMS) and Reutlingen’s Production Management program are eerily similar.  The result of this discovery has been an expansion of the existing agreement to include our AMS program along with this unique collaboration between the two closely aligned departments.

Dr. Arbuckle's program “Simulation Game: Virtual Supply Chain and Logistics Engineering ViSLER” is the WKU course AMS 368 Problem Solving taught at Reutlingen University in Germany. The aim of the course is the planning of a production facility based on real data in a worldwide virtual team.

Student will have to carry out this virtual planning of a production facility in a wold-wide planning team.  While managing virtual teams, student will have to use information and communication technologies for virtual factory planning and understand their limitations, cope with the communication limitations, and manage social conflicts that might arise in virtual teams.

The student teams are at various participating international universities, so that cultural differences and time zones will have to be overcome. 

The program is co-led by Dr. Daniel Jackson and the students will be in Germany from November 22 to December 3.