scholarly journals CreActive Accounting Education: Visioning Future-Oriented Accounting Programs through a Reflective Unlearning of Current Practice

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Nicholas McGuigan ◽  
◽  
Thomas Kern ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Accounting Education ◽  
Business Professionals ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Teaching Philosophies ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
Creativity And Innovation ◽  
Complex System Design ◽  
Future Business

The future employment markets our graduates are likely to face are increasingly complex and unpredictable. Demands are being placed on higher-education providers to become more holistic and integrated in their approach. For business schools across Australia, this requires a significant (re)conceptualisation of how student learning is facilitated, in respect to content, processes and infrastructure. Future business professionals will be required to think in diverse and integrated ways, adopting transdisciplinary approaches to solve complex system-design problems. This calls for educators to focus on creativity and innovation; in response, we need to reinterpret our teaching philosophies, content and processes. In this paper we argue that, by exploring the Bauhaus pedagogical process of “unlearning” in accounting curricula, a dynamic, engaging, and creative space can be opened up for learners and educators alike. “Unlearning” can support a critical and reflective culture for both students and teachers that nurtures a deeper understanding of the “ways of thinking” as business professionals.

Developing Biomimetic Guidelines for the Highly Optimized and Robust Design of Complex Products or Their Components

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anosh P. Wadia ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Information Transfer ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Biomimetic Design ◽  
Biological Domain ◽  
The Face ◽  
Complex System Design

Improved complex system design methods can lead to innovative, efficient, and robust product designs. This research aims at improving the design of products that compose a portion of, or exist within, a complex system. Before attempting to improve product designs, one requires a better understanding and characterization of complex systems. One method to characterize optimized and robust complex systems is to use the Theory of Highly Optimized Tolerance (HOT). The theory states that highly optimized and tolerant complex systems are robust in conditions for which they were designed, but fragile in the face of unanticipated events. Highly robust and optimized complex systems are abundant in the biological domain. In fact, nature represents a vast resource for innovative solutions to varied design problems. Leveraging these solutions to solve engineering problems is often referred to as biomimetic design. This research analyzes twenty bio-inspired engineering products including the biological system from which they were derived. The HOT theory is used analyze the biomimetic systems and identify the inherent characteristics that make the designs robust to their environment. These characteristics were reviewed to identify common features and trends present within the information transfer between the biological and engineering domains. Finally, the inferred features and trends were abstracted into usable guidelines stated as nine biomimetic design guidelines. Similar to the forty Theory of Inventive Problem Solving principles, these bio-inspired guidelines could aid engineers in developing innovative and robust solutions to design problems. In fact, a similarity between some of the biomimetic design guidelines and TRIZ principles is observed. This correlation suggests that solutions perceived as innovative in the engineering domain match those in nature.

scholarly journals Changing Needs of Business Education Students with Specific Reference to Secretarial Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Amina Sani
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Business Education ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Business Professionals ◽  
Education Students ◽  
And Training ◽  
Future Business

The need to face emerging challenges squarely should not be disregarded in today’s world. Higher education is at the centre of preparing future business professionals and equipping them with the knowledge, skills and attitudes they will need address the emerging challenges of this century. Making specific reference to the Secretarial Component of Business Education, this paper demonstrates that contemporary needs are changing rapidly. Therefore, the paper argues, education and training should change. Recommendations towards achieving these suggestions are made.Keywords: Business education; Secretarial studies; Educational reform

scholarly journals Biased Information Passing Between Subsystems Over Time in Complex System Design

2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Austin-Breneman ◽  
Bo Yang Yu ◽  
Maria C. Yang
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
System Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Systems Design ◽  
System Level ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
Early Stage Design ◽  
Complex System Design ◽  
Biased Information

During the early stage design of large-scale engineering systems, design teams are challenged to balance a complex set of considerations. The established structured approaches for optimizing complex system designs offer strategies for achieving optimal solutions, but in practice suboptimal system-level results are often reached due to factors such as satisficing, ill-defined problems, or other project constraints. Twelve subsystem and system-level practitioners at a large aerospace organization were interviewed to understand the ways in which they integrate subsystems in their own work. Responses showed subsystem team members often presented conservative, worst-case scenarios to other subsystems when negotiating a tradeoff as a way of hedging against their own future needs. This practice of biased information passing, referred to informally by the practitioners as adding “margins,” is modeled in this paper with a series of optimization simulations. Three “bias” conditions were tested: no bias, a constant bias, and a bias which decreases with time. Results from the simulations show that biased information passing negatively affects both the number of iterations needed and the Pareto optimality of system-level solutions. Results are also compared to the interview responses and highlight several themes with respect to complex system design practice.

Understanding the Impact of Decision Making on Robustness During Complex System Design: More Resilient Power Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Piacenza ◽  
Kenneth John Faller ◽  
Mir Abbas Bozorgirad ◽  
Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez ◽  
Christopher Hoyle ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
System Design ◽  
Robust Design ◽  
System Performance ◽  
System Level ◽  
Individual Risk ◽  
Cascading Failure ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Complex System Design

Abstract Robust design strategies continue to be relevant during concept-stage complex system design to minimize the impact of uncertainty in system performance due to uncontrollable external failure events. Historical system failures such as the 2003 North American blackout and the 2011 Arizona-Southern California Outages show that decision making, during a cascading failure, can significantly contribute to a failure's magnitude. In this paper, a scalable, model-based design approach is presented to optimize the quantity and location of decision-making agents in a complex system, to minimize performance loss variability after a cascading failure, regardless of where the fault originated in the system. The result is a computational model that enables designers to explore concept-stage design tradeoffs based on individual risk attitudes (RA) for system performance and performance variability, after a failure. The IEEE RTS-96 power system test case is used to evaluate this method, and the results reveal key topological locations vulnerable to cascading failures, that should not be associated with critical operations. This work illustrates the importance of considering decision making when evaluating system level tradeoffs, supporting robust design.

Towards Risk as a Tradeable Parameter in Complex System Design Trades

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Van Bossuyt ◽  
Stephen D. Wall ◽  
Irem Y. Tumer
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
System Level ◽  
Risk Models ◽  
Conceptual Designs ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Risk Visualization ◽  
Visualization Techniques ◽  
Complex System Design ◽  
Important System

Complex system conceptual design trade studies traditionally consider risk after a conceptual design has been created. Further, one person is often tasked with collecting risk information and managing it from each subsystem. This paper proposes a method to explicitly consider and trade risk on the same level as other important system-level variables during the creation of conceptual designs in trade studies. The proposed risk trading method advocates putting each subsystem engineer in control of risk for each subsystem. A risk vector is proposed that organizes many different risk metrics for communication between subsystems. A method of coupling risk models to dynamic subsystem models is presented. Several risk visualization techniques are discussed. An example is presented based upon a simplified spacecraft model. The risk trading method discussed offers an approach to more thoroughly consider risk during the creation of conceptual designs in trade studies.

Evolutionary design of modular robotic arms

Robotica ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Chocron
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Global Optimization ◽  
Design Knowledge ◽  
Evolutionary Design ◽  
Artificial Evolution ◽  
3D Kinematics ◽  
Robotic Arms ◽  
Prismatic Joints ◽  
Evolution Dynamics ◽  
Complex System Design

SUMMARYThis paper proposes a method for task based design of modular serial robotic arms using evolutionary algorithms (EA). We introduce a 3D kinematics and a global optimization for both topology and configuration from task specifications. The search features revolute as well as prismatic joints and any number of DOF to build up a solution without using any design knowledge. A study of the evolution dynamics gives some keys to set evolution parameters that enable artificial evolution. An adapted algorithm dealing with the topology/configuration search tradeoff is proposed, descibed, and discussed. Illustrations of the algorithms results are given and conclusions are drawn from their analysis. Perspectives of this work are given, extending its reach to control and complex system design.

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