Toward a Bio-Inspired System Architecting Framework: Simulation of the Integration of Autonomous Bus Fleets & Alternative Fuel Infrastructures in Closed Sociotechnical Environments

Cities are set to become highly interconnected and coordinated environments composed of emerging technologies meant to alleviate or resolve some of the daunting issues of the 21st century such as rapid urbanization, resource scarcity, and excessive population demand in urban centers. These cybernetically-enabled built environments are expected to solve these complex problems through the use of technologies that incorporate sensors and other data collection means to fuse and understand large sums of data/information generated from other technologies and its human population. Many of these technologies will be pivotal assets in supporting and managing capabilities in various city sectors ranging from energy to healthcare. However, among these sectors, a significant amount of attention within the recent decade has been in the transportation sector due to the flood of new technological growth and cultivation, which is currently seeing extensive research, development, and even implementation of emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles (AVs), the Internet of Things (IoT), alternative xxxvi fueling sources, clean propulsion technologies, cloud/edge computing, and many other technologies. Within the current body of knowledge, it is fairly well known how many of these emerging technologies will perform in isolation as stand-alone entities, but little is known about their performance when integrated into a transportation system with other emerging technologies and humans within the system organization. This merging of new age technologies and humans can make analyzing next generation transportation systems extremely complex to understand. Additionally, with new and alternative forms of technologies expected to come in the near-future, one can say that the quantity of technologies, especially in the smart city context, will consist of a continuously expanding array of technologies whose capabilities will increase with technological advancements, which can change the performance of a given system architecture. Therefore, the objective of this research is to understand the system architecture implications of integrating different alternative fueling infrastructures with autonomous bus (AB) fleets in the transportation system within a closed sociotechnical environment. By being able to understand the system architecture implications of alternative fueling infrastructures and AB fleets, this could provide performance-based input into a more sophisticated approach or framework which is proposed as a future work of this research

Analyzing data in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing fast. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), more than 28 billion things will be connected to the Internet by 2020—from smartwatches and other wearables to smart cities, smart homes, and smart cars. This O’Reilly report dives into the IoT industry through a series of illuminating talks and case studies presented at 2015 Strata + Hadoop World Conferences in San Jose, New York, and Singapore. Among the topics in this report, you’ll explore the use of sensors to generate predictions, using data to create predictive maintenance applications, and modeling the smart and connected city of the future with Kafka and Spark. Case studies include: Using Spark Streaming for proactive maintenance and accident prevention in railway equipment Monitoring subway and expressway traffic in Singapore using telco data Managing emergency vehicles through situation awareness of traffic and weather in the smart city pilot in Oulu, Finland Capturing and routing device-based health data to reduce cardiovascular disease Using data analytics to reduce human space flight risk in NASA’s Orion program This report concludes with a discussion of ethics related to algorithms that control things in the IoT. You’ll explore decisions related to IoT data, as well as opportunities to influence the moral implications involved in using the IoT

A framework for the architecting of aerospace systems portfolios with commonality

MIT Institute Archives copy: with CD-ROM; divisional library copy with no CD-ROM.Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-203).(cont.) The framework was applied to three case studies: commonality analysis for a portfolio of future and legacy exploration life support systems, for the historical Saturn launch vehicle portfolio, and for a portfolio of future lunar and Mars surface pressurized mobility systems. The case studies demonstrate the broad applicability of the methodology and provide insights into the impact of commonality on key portfolio metrics. Results indicate that commonality can enable life-cycle cost savings of 10% or more, dependent on the type of systems in the portfolio. The results further indicate that commonality can enable significant reductions in the number of custom development projects that need to be carried out in the portfolio; reductions of 50% or more were observed, dependent on the type of systems in the portfolio. As each project carries developmental risk and cost overhead, the reduction of the number of projects and the associated simplification of the portfolio must be considered a strong driver for commonality in aerospace systems portfolios.Aerospace systems are increasingly being developed as part of portfolios, or sets of related aerospace systems whose design and production is controlled by a single organizational entity. Portfolios enable synergies across the constituent systems that can reduce portfolio life cycle cost and risk; one important synergy is commonality between the systems in the portfolio. Commonality in the form of technology and design reuse between and within systems can lead to significant benefits in life-cycle portfolio cost and risk; however, commonality usually incurs up-front and life-cycle cost and risk penalties due to increased design complexity. A careful trade-off of these benefits and penalties is required in order to assess the net benefit of specific commonality opportunities in the portfolio. This trade-off needs to be carried out during the architecting stage of the portfolio life-cycle when the leverage to improve life-cycle cost and risk is greatest. Existing analysis methodologies are generally focused on commonality as indicated by similarities in design parameters and therefore have limited applicability during the architecting stage. This thesis provides a framework for the identification and assessment of commonality opportunities in aerospace systems portfolios during the architecting stage. The framework consists of a set of principles which are intended to provide general guidance for the portfolio architect, a methodology that transforms a solution-neutral description of an aerospace systems portfolio into a set of preferred portfolio design solutions with commonality, and a heuristic commonality screening tool which is integrated into the methodology.by Wilfried Konstantin Hofstetter.Ph.D