Section 20 of 21

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Optimization, queueing, quality, reliability, and project scheduling

What the section holds

Linear programming, process capability, queueing models, simulation, factorial experiment design and its analysis of variance, forecasting, reliability, learning curves, inventory models, facility planning, critical path method, PERT, the Taylor tool life formula, work sampling formulas, and a hearing-related ergonomics block.

Why it matters for your exam

This is the discipline section for Industrial and Systems candidates. It is compact, which means most industrial questions are actually served by the general statistics and economics sections earlier in the book.

How to navigate it

Fourteen pages covering sixteen subjects means each subject gets very little space. The practical consequence is that industrial candidates should drill the statistics and engineering economics sections at least as hard as this one.

Search terms that land here

queueing | critical path | PERT | learning curve | process capability

Subsections, in handbook order

These are the headings the handbook itself uses. The page number beside each is where it begins.

  • Linear Programmingp419
  • Process Capabilityp420
  • Queueing Modelsp420
  • Simulationp422
  • 2^n Factorial Experimentsp423
  • Analysis of Variance for 2^n Factorial Designsp423
  • Forecastingp423
  • Reliabilityp424
  • Facility Planningp425
  • Inventory Modelsp425
  • Learning Curvesp425
  • Critical Path Method (CPM)p427
  • PERTp428
  • Taylor Tool Life Formulap428
  • Work Sampling Formulasp428
  • Ergonomics - Hearingp431

Disciplines that use this section

Practise finding it

34 drill items in the corpus have this section as their answer.

Start a round

Page numbers here are read from handbook version 10.5 (seventh printing, April 2025), which runs to 502 pages. NCEES revises the handbook and page numbers move with it, which is why the drill asks which section a topic lives in rather than which page. Check the version of your own copy, downloaded free from NCEES.