Engineering systems in a wide variety of areas are continuing to increase in complexity. Formal design methods offer strategies for making good decisions in order to create optimal designs, but work best in well-formulated problems. Real-world design tasks are often not well-formulated and evolve over time. Our research is focused on understanding how expert design teams manage trade-offs over the course of the product development process in order to offer insights for delivering higher performance systems. Some project areas are outlined below.
Project Areas
Complex System Design Teams
Our work is focused on understanding how expert teams perform real-world complex system design tasks in order to develop improved processes and support tools. In particular, we’re interested in helping multidisciplinary teams think and work at the systems-level on real-world problems. Our work seeks to bridge the gap between practice and formal optimization research. Our research utilizes Multi-disciplinary Design Optimization and other tools to simulate design team behavior and quantify the impact on system performance of different team phenomena.
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The design of Large-scale Complex Engineering Systems (LaCES) has been at the forefront of research. Our group is investigating how to best apply advances in design thinking and systems-engineering in areas from automotive to aerospace. Our goal is to deliver higher system performance by tailoring processes and support tools to the needs of practitioners.
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Design for Emerging Markets
Emerging markets have been traditionally underserved in terms of products designed specifically for them. However, organizations from small to medium-size social enterprises have begun to develop products specifically for these areas. A critical component to the successful design of these products is to correctly manage trade-offs between the wide variety of stakeholders. Our research aims to gain a better understanding of the system-level interactions in these markets and offer strategies for designers to make better products for non-traditional user populations in these growth areas.
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