Kristina Eriksson

Kristina Eriksson is a Doctor of Philosophy in mechanical engineering and a senior lecturer in logistics at University West.

She carries out research into the best ways of planning the flow of goods in production. She defended her thesis An investigation of changeover sensitive heuristics in an industrial job shop environment in 2006 at the University of Bath in the UK. One of the cases studied in her PhD thesis was a company that tests electronic equipment. Different types of apparatus went through a varying number of tests at different stations. The company used a queuing system so that the apparatus were tested in the order in which they arrived. Kristina Eriksson used computer simulations to test a number of alternative planning strategies. She demonstrated that the flow could be sped up if the apparatus was grouped differently and the sequence was considered. This type of computer simulation can be used within many different areas, such as queues in healthcare or transportation by road and rail.

Since defending her thesis, Kristina Eriksson has researched similar problems within automotive production, studying the flow of car components from the factory warehouse to the assembly line. This project specifically looked at the impact of different product variants as regards more environmentally friendly cars.

Currently she and her colleagues are investigating how production computer simulations can be made more flexible.

Kristina Eriksson teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students at the mechanical engineering and industrial engineering programmes. She supervises students' final year projects and other students' projects in collaboration with industry or other organisations, such as hospitals. She is the chairwoman of the research committee at the Department of Engineering Science and responsible for internationalisation of the departments master courses.

References to some of the works published by Dr Eriksson in the DiVA database.