Complementarities of part-time and full-time postgraduates in process systems engineering (PSE): when industry and academia merges

ABSTRACT

Academia is an arena where practitioners from industry are integrated to theoreticians. Such alliance has been intensified by the industry 4.0 (I4) age from which these counterparts are seeking to merge efforts towards society 5.0 (S5), enabling next generations to easily accept novelties and changes in well-established operations, process-of-work, behaviours, etc. In educational centres, such a pace into the I4-S5 state pushes new ways of adopting (or adapting current) sharing of work among peers since this may potentially become a tool for an efficient process-of-research. Thus, we particularly cover postgraduate centres with part-time (PT) and full-time (FT) students in the fields of process system engineering (PSE) and we are widely relying on computer aided process engineering (CAPE) tools, algorithms, software, packages, etc. A collaborative research and development of PSE-CAPE systems may a) involve PT and FT postgraduates in multi-disciplinary fields of science and engineering and b) go across physics, math, and technologies to include social sciences, public policies, and beyond. The proposition is to analyse PT-FT synergies considering their experiences, accessibility of data to validate models, viability to handle CAPE tools, etc. An example of collaboration between PT and FT students, involving a university, a research center, a consulting company, and a medical corporation, is highlighted to optimise healthcare treatment systems for social progress and sustainable development amid COVID-19. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.