Global Automotive And Manufacturing Engineering Curriculum

Global Automotive And Manufacturing Engineering Curriculum Information:

30 total credit hours, at least 24 credits at the 500 level, and at least 24 graded. Minimum GPA 3.0/4.0 required for graduation. At most, 6 credit-hours at the 400-level may be applied towards the degree. Complete all of the courses on the approved Plan of Study within five years from the date of first enrollment in the program. No more than 6 credit hours can be transferred from another institution. 

The Master of Engineering (MEng) in Global Automotive and Manufacturing Engineering is, on average, completed in 1 year and 4 months on a full-time basis, but could be completed in 1 to 2 years. Part-time students on average complete the degree in 3 years but are allowed up to 5 years.

Integrative Science (6-9 Credits)

Required Courses, Select One Course In Each of the Two Categories Below (for a total of 6 Credits)

Systems Courses:

Manufacturing Courses:

Select One Additional Course from These Course Categories (3 Credits)

  • Model-Based Systems & Design
  • Integrative Thinking
  • Socio-Technology
  • Global Engineering Leadership
  • Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Career Pathways (9 Credits)​

Course Offerings (9 Credits)

  • Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing
  • Advanced Automotive Structures
  • Electrification/Powertrain Integration & Manufacturing
  • Global Supply Chain and Engineering Leadership

Program Core (9 Credits)

Select courses from across the Core areas. Each course selected must come from a different Program Core

Course Offerings (9 Credits)

  • Auto-body Materials
  • Automotive Structures
  • Vehicle Manufacturing & Assembly

Immersive Practice (3-6 Credits)

Course Offerings (3-6 Credits)

  • AUTO 503 Or MFG 503 for one or two semesters, 3 credits per semester

* Please Note: ISD cannot guarantee these courses are available every academic year or every term; these lists are updated on an on-going basis.

Integrative Science

(6-9 Credits)

Required Course

Global Engineering Leadership

Engineering leaders are needed to strategically think and act globally based on an integration of academic excellence in engineering and business, experience in a variety of settings and environments, and the ability to lead across cultures and within organizations of varied sizes. In this field, you will strengthen your ability to develop engineering and business practices, develop cross-cultural leadership competencies, learn how to work within a global community, and lead with purpose, strategy, and vision in the development of sustainable global products, services, and processes for the common good.

 

Key Competencies:

  • Ability to scope and identify unique challenges of global engineering projects:
    • Global regulatory issues
    • Internationally-recognized engineering and manufacturing quality norms
    • Managing technology and legal contracts
    • Global Supply Chain Issues/Outsourcing/ Offshoring/
    • Re-positioning of Corporations and Subcontractors
    • Risk Management
    • Cross-cultural decision making
    • Understanding consequences/impact of decisions
  • Provide tools for taking corrective actions (within context of “real-world” global problems)
  • International Cultural Competency
  • Multicultural team management and global team leadership

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation and entrepreneurship drive today’s engineering world. Fueling this growth from global corporations to small businesses and national governments to local governments is a need to build sustainable products, services, and technologies. In this field, you will integrate concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship with engineering, science, and design in pursuit of opportunities to innovate solutions to highly complex problems. Here, you will learn how to be the next industry “true innovators” in strengthening market uptake of raw materials solutions and building a bigger platform for a greener future

Key Competencies:

  • Knowledge of market forces
  • Financial insight (understanding numbers)
  • Strategic thinking
  • Negotiation
  • Persuasion
  • Ability to influence
  • Creativity
  • Business planning and integration

Courses

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Integrative Thinking

Integrative thinking requires seeing problems from multiple viewpoints, taking them all into consideration, and searching for creative solutions through a transformative approach. It requires shifting the focus to the vulnerabilities and capacities of single systems or sectors to interconnected systems and how these will shift over time, taking into account multidirectional interactions of projected changes, responses, and effects. This leads to understanding how to compose a holistic view of a problem, co-construct new knowledge, explore alternative views and methods of problem analysis, and synthesize them into a coherent solution. In this field, you will discover how to integrate across multiple boundaries for the greater good.

Key Competencies:

  • Broad technical, business, management, and education experience
  • Ability to construct and correlate models that are abstractions of interactions and to evaluate data against the model
  • “Big picture” thinking
  • Understanding, at least at the top level, what knowledge domains are relevant and prioritizing their importance

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Model Based Systems and Design

Solving complex problems requires deeper levels of systems understanding. Modeling helps designers/engineers work at greater levels of complexity to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases. In this field, you will strengthen your ability to create and implement models to support every stage of the engineering and design process as well as drive learning for modeling, analyzing, and solving complex problems.

Key Competencies:

  • Modeling complex systems
  • Optimization
  •  Data analytics
  • Behavioral models
  • Business/Dynamic modeling
  • Qualitative models
  • Digital twins development
  • Evaluate data quality

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options​

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Socio-Technology

Engineers are needed to design within social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. In this field, you will design things that participate in complex systems that have both social and technical aspects, study the intersection of society and technology as a grouping of social engineering and management science and learn how to develop new technologies to meet challenges in energy, environment, food, housing, water, transportation, safety, and health. You will also learn the societal impact of engineering and design decisions at the intersection of science and technology. 

Key Competencies:

  • Socially engaged decision making
  • Operational understanding of the impact of technology on society, world, environment (vice versa)
  • Global awareness

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options​

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Program Core

(9 Credits)

Auto-Body Materials

Today’s motor vehicle designs are increasingly focused on the effective use of lightweight materials and mixed materials for achieving structural lighting and performance. Advanced materials are essential for boosting the fuel economy of modern automobiles while maintaining safety and performance. Because it takes less energy to accelerate a lighter object than a heavier one, lightweight materials offer great potential for increasing vehicle efficiency. In this field, you will learn how both modern lightweight metals and various forms of polymeric composites have become essential. Their properties and manufacturability must be well understood for their effective use in automotive structures.

Key Competencies:

  • Manufacturability for automotive applications
  • Mechanical properties of modern lightweight metals and polymeric composites 
  • Testing and characterization techniques

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

 

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Automotive Structures

In addition to handling and maneuverability, all structural modules need to satisfy a set of safety and structural performance requirements. Furthermore, these structural modules must take into account manufacturability and downstream vehicle assembly, or design for manufacturing or design for assembly. In this field, you will study the design, construction, equipment, and regulation of automotive structures to minimize the occurrence and consequences of traffic collision involving motor vehicles. Essential to this process is understanding a vehicle’s crashworthiness, durability, sustainability, and fatigue.

 
 

Key Competencies:

  • Vehicle and component structural analysis methods, including:
    • Crashworthiness
    • Design for manufacturing and assembly
    • Durability/fatigue
    • NVH

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Vehicle Manufacturing And Assembly

Vehicle manufacturing and assembly are increasingly relying on emerging smart technologies and advanced manufacturing processes for ensuring quality, safety, and productivity. In this field, you will learn how both mechanics-based modeling and data-driven modeling are essential for taking advantage of the benefits of rapidly evolving smart manufacturing technologies. You will also understand how to create highly efficient product and process solutions that form the future of mobility, safety, environmental sustainability through advanced and component manufacturing processes, statistical quality control, variation control methodologies, and assembly modeling methods and procedures.

Key Competencies:

  • Advanced manufacturing processes 
  • Assembly modeling methods 
  • Mechanics principles for design-for-modular manufacturing and assembly
  • Assembly procedures 
  • Major vehicle and component manufacturing processes
  • Statistical quality control
  • Variation control methodologies 

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Career Pathways

(9 Credits)

Advanced Automotive Structures

Modern automotive structures are rapidly evolving, driven by sustainability challenges and paradigm shifts in mobility definition, e.g., autonomous vehicles, etc. Emphasis today is on lightweighting, which is building cars and trucks that are less heavy as a way to achieve better fuel efficiency and handling. This includes making parts from carbon fiber, windshields from plastic, and bumpers out of aluminum foam, as ways to lessen vehicle load. In this field, you will learn about advanced structural concepts and design analysis methods for load-bearing body structures and chassis frames, as well as for achieving optimum use of lightweight materials, particularly in the form of multi-materials structures.

Key Competencies:

  • Auto Body structures
  • Vehicle CAE methods
  • Lightweight structural materials and properties
  • Mechanics of joints/connections, and joint properties under as-manufactured conditions

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing

Vehicle manufacturing and assembly, in addition to being governed by quality and efficiency, must be adaptable to localization and customization needs. In this field, you will learn emerging manufacturing processes, design for assembly principles, mechanics basis of modular design and assembly, dimensional variation control techniques, and quality definition and control, product engineering, development and manufacturing of advanced vehicle systems, including body, interior, chassis and electrical/electronic systems design, variation propagation and control, and production engineering and manufacturing processes and methods.

Key Competencies:

  • Global manufacturing
  • Mechanics principles of design-for-modular manufacturing and assembly
  • Modeling of manufacturing processes and modular assembly
  • Mechanics principles of modularity definitions
  • Modular assembly and optimum sequencing
  • Production engineering
  • Variation propagation and control

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Electrification/Powertrain Integration And Manufacturing

Electric vehicles or electric propulsion will continue to drive the rapid transformation of the mobility industries for the foreseeable future. Integrating powertrain systems into a compact mechanical enclosure can lead to more affordable, more efficient electric vehicles. In this field, you will learn about battery systems and assembly, electric drive system, advanced design and system integration of electric and hybrid powertrain systems with an emphasis on weight and cost reduction and system reliability.

 

Key Competencies:

  • Battery systems and assembly
  • Electric drive system
  • Hybrid powertrain systems and assembly
  • Inter-connection joint quality and system reliability

Courses

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Global Supply Chain And Engineering Leadership

The resilience of global supply chains has become increasingly important in relation to cost reduction and proximity to customers. To be successful, future technology leaders must possess critical skill sets in global engineering and culture/geopolitical awareness, and take advantage of modern digitalization for both leading global project teams or supply chain management. In this field, you will gain an advanced proficiency in industry-related supply chain management software, in-depth knowledge of supply chain analytics, KPI measurement, extensive experience in supply chain analysis and optimization, and analytical, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills.

Key Competencies:

  • Global engineering principles and practice
  • Global manufacturing, team science
  • International quality norm systems and technical basis
  • Supply chain management
  • Supply chain modeling

ISD Courses

Additional Course Options

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Immersive Practice

(3-6 Credits)

Practicum

Work for leading industry partners to apply what you learn during your ISD coursework in a semester- or year-long project to contribute new ideas and knowledge to high priority engineering and technical issues. Learn more about this component of the ISD Curriculum on the ISD Practicum page.

 

Courses

AUTO 503 Project Practicum

A 3-credit capstone project enrollment, or approved alternative, is required for graduation. A second capstone project enrollment for 3 credits, in another semester, is allowed pending Program Director approval and depends on the performance of achieving the goals of the first capstone project.

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