Multidisciplinary analysis for highway engineering purposes

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Learning to Tango: Sustainable development and the multidisciplinary dream

It is widely accepted that the creation of a sustainable future will require considerable collaboration between a range of academic and professional disciplines. This need is usually expressed in calls for the formation of multidisciplinary teams that are designed to explore the issues and develop our understanding of the problem space. However, there would appear to be few attempts to understand how such teams operate and how they should be managed. This paper explores collective music making as a useful metaphor for understanding the role of specialist skills, of generalist, management and support skills and the way they could be harnessed so that each is able to provide the right contribution at the right time ensuring that all contributions intertwine to create a powerful song. In unpacking the multidisciplinary bag, the paper draws on the author’s experience and observations in both collective music making and the development of regulatory structures and technologies for sustainable housing. It provides a reflective reassessment of the nature of multidisciplinary working and how, with a much deeper understanding of the difficulties involved, multidisciplinary approaches can be enabled so as to deliver the solutions required for a more sustainable world

Safe environments for innovation: developing a new multidisciplinary masters programme

This paper outlines the research and resulting curriculum design activities conducted as a collaborative venture between Northumbria University’s School of Design, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences and Newcastle Business School undertaken in the creation of a new postgraduate programme in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation. With the area of multidisciplinary innovation education practice being comparatively new, the research conducted in support of the programme development was undertaken through a series of industry-linked pilot-study projects conducted with Philips, Hasbro, Lego and Unilever. The key finding from this research was an understanding of the importance of freeing students from different disciplines of the inhibitions that limit creativity in collaborative settings. This paper gives an account of the pilot studies and the associated learning derived from them, the collaborative development of the programme and approaches in curriculum and assessment design adopted in order to create what we call ‘safe environments for innovation’; environments designed to free students of these evident inhibitions

Multidisciplinary design of a micro-USV for re-entry operations

Unmanned Space Vehicles (USV) are seen as a test-bed for enabling technologies and as a carrier to deliver and return experiments to and from low-Earth orbit. USV's are a potentially interesting solution also for the exploration of other planets or as long-range recognisance vehicles. As test bed, USV's are seen as a stepping stone for the development of future generation re-usable launchers but also as way to test key technologies for re-entry operations. Examples of recent developments are the PRORA-USV, designed by the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA) in collaboration with Gavazzi Space, or the Boeing X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), that is foreseen as an alternative to the space shuttle to deliver experiments into Earth orbit. Among the technologies to be demonstrated with the X-37 are improved thermal protection systems, avionics, the autonomous guidance system, and an advanced airfram

Western Baptist Hospital: Problem-Solving With Pneumonia Care Performance Improvement Teams

Describes successful strategies for strengthening pneumonia care, including multidisciplinary performance improvement teams, process improvements built into staff routines, peer collaboratives, standard order sets, and feedback through concurrent review

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Approximated models for aerodynamic coefficients estimation in a multidisciplinary design environment

In this paper variable fidelity analyses are investigated. Moreover different kind of approximations to be used in a wide multidisciplinary design environment for aircraft design are built. In order to obtain the surrogate models used in the main design process, a proper framework is built by different design of experiments techniques for process and variables management. Approximated models for the estimation of aerodynamic coefficients are evaluated on design spaces of different dimensions and considering different set of variables (i.e. geometric parameters and flight conditions). They are mainly based on the hybrid combination of Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) models representing the basic low fidelity analysis) and 3D finite volume Computational Fluid Dynamics models (representing the basic high fidelity analysis). Different strategies for the evaluation of the surrogate model are considered and an original methodology for the model construction is here presented

Towards a multidisciplinary user-centric design framework for context-aware applications

The primary aim of this article is to review and merge theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitate application developers in developing richer descriptions or scenarios of how a context-aware device may be used in various dynamic mobile settings. More specifically, the aim is to:1. Investigate different viewpoints of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to develop summary condensed models for each discipline. 2. Investigate the impact of contrasting viewpoints on the usability of context-aware applications. 3. Investigate the extent to which single-discipline models can be merged and the benefits and insightfulness of a merged model for designing mobile computers. 4. Investigate the extent to which a proposed multidisciplinary modelcan be applied to specific applications of context-aware computing