European industry today faces a high level of regional and international competition. This is also the situation in the Mediterranean area. Several factors define an industrial company's competitiveness including industrial area development, energy and environmental issues, new product development time, production lead time, flexibility in responding to variability in demand volume, quality, price, responsiveness to customer delivery requirements, other logistics problems, and management and control of state-of-the-art processes and technologies. In each case, the company's ability to respond to these factors depends critically on the capability of its industrial / logistics organisation and its environmental awareness.

It is becoming increasingly evident that resources are limited in extent, and alternative methods for the transformation of resources need therefore to be evaluated by an increasingly sophisticated and accurate methodology.

A group of professors from different European universities established MEDIFAS to get together researchers from engineering disciplines, in particular the fields of Industrial Engineering and Production Economics, in order to develop and to disseminate knowledge developed in MEDIFAS in the Mediterranean area and from here all over the world.

Researchers at MEDIFAS are developing a coherent set of methodologies, computer-aided tools, and experiments to design, analyse and improve production and logistics systems often embedded in a spatially well-defined environment, being exposed to risk and uncertainty. These include: Risk control; An integrated approach to modelling, analysis and simulation of flexible systems to answer questions related to production and distribution location, equipment and process selection, product lot sizing and flow design; Computerised tools to design and optimise supply chain; Simulation tools to design and evaluate flexible supply chain cells; Methodologies for systems and product design, Methodologies for industrial real estate location analysis, which influence manufacturing systems that are more economical to analyse, control, and operate.

The Research Group is offering projects, skills and expertise necessary to compete successfully in production and supply systems, especially in the global environment, together with a mehodology for analysing and controlling risks. Location analysis and human resource evaluation in global supply systems are also included in the fundamental analysis of production and supply chains.

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