Our Mission: Educating future leaders in those engineering and technical professions that build on the intellectual foundations of Industrial and Information Systems Engineering and creating new knowledge through which these disciplines can address problems of contemporary and future importance to society.

Our Vision: To provide intellectual leadership in the evolution of our core disciplines of Industrial and Information Systems Engineering and to continuously adapt them to address the highest priority problems of modern society and meet the dynamically changing needs and aspirations of our students.

The Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems (DSES) exemplifies Rensselaer's pioneering efforts in multidisciplinary education and research. In 1987, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recognized the evolving need for a new endeavor in decision sciences, one that fused the advances possible through each of several distinct disciplines into a new and synergistic entity. The response was to form a unique inter-school department: DSES. This new department brought together faculty from the Schools of Engineering, Management and Science. In 1996, the department was relocated; it became solely a department in the School of Engineering (SoE).

DSES combines engineering, management, and scientific methods and approaches in its endeavors. Indeed, DSES has served to broaden and to strengthen the courses, curricula, and research of the SoE. The challenges of analyzing data, managing information, modeling systems, and improving decision making, have never been greater. DSES is superbly qualified to prepare engineering students to meet these challenges in business, industry and government and in the manufacturing and services sectors of the global economy.

Today, DSES — with its increased undergraduate and graduate enrollments and growth in funded research — has clearly become a critical and vital academic unit; we have assumed a leadership role among the 7 SoE departments and contributed to the SoE's endeavors in core engineering (which includes a set of courses that all students in SoE's 12 undergraduate degree programs are required to take). While still young, DSES has underscored the wisdom of the 1987 decision: there is, indeed, considerable synergism in approaching decision making and problem solving from a multidisciplinary perspective.