scholarly journals Holistic Engineering Design: A Combined Synchronous and Asynchronous Approach

Author(s):  
A. P. Conway ◽  
M. D. Giess ◽  
A. Lynn ◽  
L. Ding ◽  
Y. M. Goh ◽  
...  

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches.

Author(s):  
Justin A. Rockwell ◽  
Ian R. Grosse ◽  
Sundar Krishnamurty ◽  
Jack C. Wileden

A semantic information model to improve reuse and communication of engineering design knowledge is presented in this paper. We consider design to be a process involving a sequence of decisions informed by the current state of information. As such, the information model developed is structured to reflect the conceptualizations of engineering design decisions with a particular emphasis on semantically capturing design rationale. Through the approach presented, knowledge reuse is achieved by communicating design rationale. A case study is presented to illustrate two key features of the approach: (1) seamless integration of separate modular domain ontologies and instance knowledge related to engineering design that are needed to support decision making and (2) the explicit documentation of design rationale through design decisions.


Author(s):  
W. P. Neumann ◽  
J. Winkel

A case study in Volvo Powertrain is conducted to examine the distribution of responsibility for human factors in the companies’ engineering design process. Design decisions with human factors impact, and hence system performance implications, are identified in the design of both the product and the production system in a chain of decisions, spread across multiple stakeholder groups. Thus the organisational structure of the engineering design process appears to influence the ability to handle human factors appropriately at each stage of design. Responsibility (although perhaps not accountability) appears to be distributed throughout the engineering design process. Thus human factors aspects require careful coordination throughout engineering design.


Author(s):  
Mark Schwabacher ◽  
Thomas Ellman ◽  
Haym Hirsh

We are working on using machine learning to make the numerical optimization of complex engineering designs faster and more reliable. We envision a system that learns from previous design sessions knowledge that enables it to assist the engineer in setting up and carrying out a new design optimization. We have performed initial experiments for two aspects of setting up an optimization: selecting a prototype to serve as a starting point for the optimization and selecting a reformulation of the search space. Both choices can dramatically affect the speed and the reliability of design optimization.


Author(s):  
Erik K. Antonsson ◽  
Yizhen Zhang ◽  
Alcherio Martinoli

In the engineering design process, it is important to know the engineering trade-offs achievable under various design preferences and strategies. In this paper, a family of engineering design trade-offs are evolved from an automatic design synthesis methodology based on evolutionary computation. The complete Pareto optima frontier can be evolved by a consideration of fitness function that aggregates the weighted fuzzy design preferences under different trade-off strategies. An initial case study concerned with the configuration of a collective sensory system is presented and discussed, along with preliminary results obtained from simulations under a specific scenario. The results indicate that the approach can be useful for designers to solve complex engineering problems.


Author(s):  
Lu Xiao ◽  
Trina Joyce Sajo

Librarian 2.0 adopts user-centered approach. This paper reports the case study of a community-based participatory approach for training librarian 2.0. The findings suggest that this approach allows the students to practice user-centered interactions, identify and integrate the user’s needs into design decisions, and develop ways of collecting the user’s feedbacks.Les bibliothécaires 2.0 adoptent une approche centrée sur l’utilisateur. Cet article présente une étude de cas sur une approche participative et communautaire visant à former les bibliothécaires 2.0. Les résultats suggèrent que cette approche permet aux étudiants d’interagir avec les usagers, d’identifier les besoins, de les intégrer dans leur processus décisionnel et de développer des moyens de recueillir les commentaires des usagers. 


Geriatrics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Kristina Marie Kokorelias ◽  
Einat Danieli ◽  
Sheila Dunn ◽  
Sid Feldman ◽  
David Patrick Ryan ◽  
...  

The number of family caregivers to individuals with dementia is increasing. Family physicians are often the first point of access to the health care system for individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Caregivers are at an increased risk of developing negative physical, cognitive and affective health problems themselves. Caregivers also describe having unmet needs to help them sustain care in the community. Family physicians are in a unique position to help support caregivers and individuals with dementia, but often struggle with keeping up with best practice dementia service knowledge. The Dementia Wellness Questionnaire was designed to serve as a starting point for discussions between caregivers and family physicians by empowering caregivers to communicate their needs and concerns and to enhance family physicians’ access to specific dementia support information. The DWQ aims to alert physicians of caregiver and patient needs. This pilot study aimed to explore the experiences of physicians and caregivers of people using the Questionnaire in two family medicine clinics in Ontario, Canada. Interviews with physicians and caregivers collected data on their experiences using the DWQ following a 10-month data gathering period. Data was analyzed using content analysis. Results indicated that family physicians may have an improved efficacy in managing dementia by having dementia care case specific guidelines integrated within electronic medical records. By having time-efficient access to tailored supports, family physicians can better address the needs of the caregiver–patient dyad and help support family caregivers in their caregiving role. Caregivers expressed that the Questionnaire helped them remember concerns to bring up with physicians, in order to receive help in a more efficient manner.


Designs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Daniel Moran ◽  
Atila Ertas ◽  
Utku Gulbulak

The continued displacement of refugees from their homes and homelands (now greater than 50 million people worldwide) places increased focus and attention on evolving the designs of temporary housing that is available to be provided to the refugee population, especially in rural areas where housing does not already exist and must be constructed in very little time. Complex engineering problems involving social issues, such as this case study, benefit from the use of Integrated Transdisciplinary (TD) Tools (ITDT) to effectively and efficiently address the design questions related to them. The integrated use of TD Tools such as Kano Analysis, KJ Diagrams, Critical to Quality (CTQ), House of Quality (HOQ)/Quality Function Design (QFD), Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Axiomatic Design (AD), Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), and Design Structure Matrix (DSM) through an end-to-end unique design process leads to innovation and elimination of design conflicts for especially complicated design problems. The objective of this study is to examine the design of temporary refugee housing using integrated TD tools mentioned above. This research concludes that the use of the ITDT approach provides an innovative, decoupled design.


Author(s):  
Serhad Sarica ◽  
Binyang Song ◽  
Jianxi Luo ◽  
Kristin L. Wood

Abstract There are growing efforts to mine public and common-sense semantic network databases for engineering design ideation stimuli. However, there is still a lack of design ideation aids based on semantic network databases that are specialized in engineering or technology-based knowledge. In this study, we present a new methodology of using the Technology Semantic Network (TechNet) to stimulate idea generation in engineering design. The core of the methodology is to guide the inference of new technical concepts in the white space surrounding a focal design domain according to their semantic distance in the large TechNet, for potential syntheses into new design ideas. We demonstrate the effectiveness in general, and use strategies and ideation outcome implications of the methodology via a case study of flying car design idea generation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 261-263 ◽  
pp. 1709-1713
Author(s):  
Meng Yang ◽  
Xiao Min Liu

This paper introduces a new failure mode pattern of soil slope – the logarithmic spiral slippery fracture. A mathematical model for the logarithmic spiral slippery fracture is established, taking the anti-shear function of the soil-nailing into consideration. The shear of soil-nailing, axial force, and the safety coefficients based on the limiting equilibrium method are derived, leading to an accurate stability analysis of the strengthening of soil slope. A case study shows that the anti-shear function of the soil-nailing can be significant and should not be ignored in engineering design.


Author(s):  
Nicolás F. Soria ◽  
Mitchell K. Colby ◽  
Irem Y. Tumer ◽  
Christopher Hoyle ◽  
Kagan Tumer

In complex engineering systems, complexity may arise by design, or as a by-product of the system’s operation. In either case, the root cause of complexity is the same: the unpredictable manner in which interactions among components modify system behavior. Traditionally, two different approaches are used to handle such complexity: (i) a centralized design approach where the impacts of all potential system states and behaviors resulting from design decisions must be accurately modeled; and (ii) an approach based on externally legislating design decisions, which avoid such difficulties, but at the cost of expensive external mechanisms to determine trade-offs among competing design decisions. Our approach is a hybrid of the two approaches, providing a method in which decisions can be reconciled without the need for either detailed interaction models or external mechanisms. A key insight of this approach is that complex system design, undertaken with respect to a variety of design objectives, is fundamentally similar to the multiagent coordination problem, where component decisions and their interactions lead to global behavior. The design of a race car is used as the case study. The results of this paper demonstrate that a team of autonomous agents using a cooperative coevolutionary algorithm can effectively design a Formula racing vehicle.


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