Dr. Ahmed Azab is Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Automotive and Materials Engineering and Director of the Production and Operations Analytics Research Lab. He was Visiting Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals from 2024 to 2026. He is a licensed professional engineer.
His research develops the planning functions of smart manufacturing: computer-aided process planning, scheduling, lot sizing, and facility layout, using operations research, machine learning, and digital twins. The same models are applied to operating-room planning and to power-grid planning for electric vehicles. The Welcome page describes the current program. Courses are listed on the Teaching page.
The work has been sponsored by NSERC, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Centre of Excellence, Mitacs, FedDev Ontario, the University of Windsor, industry contracts, and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. He is one of three faculty members on a Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund award that equipped a reconfigurable, transformable assembly system.
Doctoral graduates from the group hold faculty positions at Bemidji State University (Dr. Nusrat Chowdhury), Cape Breton University (Dr. Alejandro Vital-Soto), and United Arab Emirates University (Dr. Aiman Ziout). Other former members work in industry in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Current students and research staff are listed on the People page.
Dr. Azab serves on the editorial board of Expert Systems with Applications, on the editorial board of the Journal of Data, Information and Management, and on the topic advisory panel of the Journal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing. He is guest editor of special issues in Machines and Mathematics. ScholarGPS placed his manufacturing scholarship in the top 0.5 percent of scholars worldwide in the 2024 rankings, released in 2025. In 2024 he received the IEOM Outstanding Teaching and Learning Award at the 2nd GCC Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Conference in Muscat.
He is a member of the ASME Manufacturing Engineering Division’s Manufacturing Systems Technical Committee and has chaired symposia at the ASME Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference and sessions at the SME North American Manufacturing Research Conference. In February 2026 he gave an invited keynote at the 3rd GCC Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Conference at the University of Tabuk.
Areas of interest
- Computer-aided process planning, including generative models for hybrid manufacturing
- Scheduling and shop-floor digital twins
- Lot sizing and delayed product differentiation
- Dynamic and robust facility layout
- Supply-chain design under risk
- Operating-room planning
- Power-system planning for electric-vehicle charging and distributed generation
- Operations research and machine learning
Contact
Email: azab@uwindsor.ca
Telephone: 519-253-3000, ext. 4958
Lab: uwindsor.ca/poa
Google Scholar: Ahmed Azab