A gap exists in the methods used in industry and available in academia that prevents customers and engineers from having a voice when considering engineering risk appetite in the dynamic shaping of early-phase conceptual design trade study outcomes. Current methods used in Collaborative Design Centers either collect risk information after...
An Engineering Decision Support System, EDSS, was developed using Bayesian mathematics which incorporates knowledge and confidence components observed in alternative-criterion pair decision making. The separation of knowledge and confidence has been previously unaccounted for in decision-making methods. EDSS provides decision support to individuals or teams which must make choices between...
While many organizations claim to "put safety first," safety is rarely considered early in the design process when system-level architectural decisions are made. Instead, system design follows an abstraction-to-detail process to first meet functional and then performance requirements. Following this process, safety assurance occurs in the later stages of design...
Risk is a crucial decision factor besides traditional cost and performance during collaborative decision making in a distributed environment. Three main challenges exist: 1) stakeholders' different perspectives and/or diverse cultures can lead to inconsistent risk probability evaluations; 2) risk consequence is hard to be quantified in concrete unit; 3) risk...
This thesis compares two methods for studying the problem-solving processes of
mechanical design engineers. The first method, verbal protocol analysis, was applied
by L. Stauffer to construct a problem-solving model of mechanical design. The
second method, timing analysis, measures the time intervals separating drawing or
speaking actions during the design...
Sustainability has been the focus of intense discussions over the past two decades, with topics around the entire product life cycle. In the manufacturing phase, research has been focused solely on environmental impact assessment or environmental impact and cost analysis in its assessment of sustainability. However, few efforts have investigated...
Modern civil commercial transport aircraft provide the means for the safest of all forms of transportation. While advanced computer technology ranging from flight management computers to warning and alerting devices contributed to flight safety significantly, it is undisputed that the flightcrew represents the most frequent primary cause factor in airline...
Building intelligent computer assistants has been a long-cherished goal of AI. Many intelligent assistant systems were built and fine-tuned to specific application domains. In this work, we develop a general model of assistance that combines three powerful ideas: decision theory, hierarchical task models and probabilistic relational languages. We use the...
Modern commercial air travel is considered by most transportation specialists to be the safest of all forms of transportation. While safe, any loss of life is tragic and the only really acceptable state of commercial air transport safety is that of 'zero-tolerance' where no accident is acceptable.
Research has demonstrated...
Current life cycle assessment tools are often deficient in assisting design for sustainable manufacturing efforts. Integrating an improved assessment method into a decision support framework will provide a means for designers and engineers to better understand the impacts of their decisions. A unit process modeling-based sustainability assessment method is presented...