Associate Professor Nikolaos Papakostas

Dr Nikolaos Papakostas is an Associate Professor at the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering in University College Dublin. He is the Director of the Master of Engineering with Business Programme. His research areas include the following fields: Simulation, Control and Scheduling of Manufacturing SystemsDigital Manufacturing Applications (CAx, PLM)Virtualization of Manufacturing Systems and Processes using Industry 4.0 technologiesEngineering / Manufacturing Knowledge Management and Big Data Analytics Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for the Management of Supply Chains and Dynamic Manufacturing Networks He worked at the Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation (LMS) of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Greece from 2005 to 2015, and was the technical coordinator of a number of European Research Projects. He has cooperated with many leading companies in Europe from the automotive and aerospace industrial sectors as well as with firms from the process, textile, machine tool building, shipbuilding / ship-repair and software industry. From 2001 to 2005 he worked as CIO in INTRAMET Steel and Electromechanical Constructions S.A. (now merged with INTRAKAT S.A.), the second largest company in its field in Greece. In particular, his duties included the following: Coordinating and managing the deployment of the SAP R/3 ERP system, addressing the needs of the finance, sales, procurement, inventory and production and quality control departments Statistical analysis of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) regarding productionManaging the procurement, administration and maintenance processes for all CAD / CAM / CNC systems He worked as a Research Engineer at LMS from 1995 to 2000 and participated in a number of research projects involving software development. As the head of the software development team, he had a crucial role in the development of the simulation engine, the multi-criteria decision-making mechanism and the GUI of real-time, simulation oriented and rule -based scheduling systems as well as of agent-based control systems for refineries, shipyards, textile and cable manufacturers. Besides Greek (native language), he has an excellent command of the English language and a good knowledge of German. He is a member of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP), of IEEE and of the Technical Chamber of Greece. He has more than 80 publications in international scientific journals and refereed conferences and his work has been cited more than 500 times. He received a PhD in Engineering (2000) and a Diploma (MSc) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece (1995).