Understanding Designer Mental Models to Support Computer Directed Analogical Design

Analysis of alternative concepts has a significant impact on design project outcomes, and yet many design teams fail to consider a significantly broad range of conceptual solutions. Within the realm of conceptual design exists a technique called design by analogy (DBA) -- the practice of reapplying old solutions to new problems. DBA mitigates the effort required to generate a large field of candidate concepts by leveraging existing knowledge from a wide variety of domains, making it an attractive approach toward improving design outcomes. Unfortunately, DBA is challenging in the absence of expert knowledge. Designers need computational support in order to effectively identify a large number of high-quality analogical connections across a wide variety of domains. With this challenge in mind, the goal of this dissertation is to improve the body of knowledge regarding computational support for design by analogy. More specifically, this body of work includes five manuscripts. Manuscript 0 presents a review of several function-related design abstractions, including their impacts on education and industry. Manuscript 1 studies analogy retrieval in a novel design context and catalogs the types of abstract similarity (including function) commonly used to form analogies. Manuscript 2 examines a scalable approach to capturing analogy-relevant design knowledge to support large-scale analogy searching. Manuscripts 3 and 4 examine and modify a technique from de novo drug design for quickly indexing and retrieving design analogies. Manuscript 3 examines the domain independence of the technique, and manuscript 4 develops it as a large-scale design analogy search method. The body of work contributes to a greater understanding of (1) the abstractions used by designers during conceptual design, (2) the use of human computation to support conceptual design activities, and (3) large scale solution screening using a variety of mixed design abstractions. This understanding advances the creation of tools that enable designers to consider a wide range of conceptual solutions in spite of lacking domain expertise

Experimental Module Creation for Forensic Engineering Education

Experimental modules were researched and created for use in a future Applied Design of Experiments course in the Interdisciplinary Engineering Department\u27s developing Forensic Engineering Track. Five modules were pursued, with three showing promise for use in a lecture/laboratory course. An experimental module testing cricket chirping rate as a predictor of temperature was developed, tested, and shows promise. A module for detecting residue on currency was pursued and discovered to exist in classroom-ready form at another university. Creation of a module for testing the feasibility and properties of an ice projectile was deemed unfeasible for this application in the face of cost and safety issues. A preexisting module involving solar panels was tested and refined, and a newly created earthquake engineering module succeeded in a middle school setting but fell short of suitability for college use

Toward a functional failure analysis method of identifying and mitigating spurious system emissions in a system of systems

The article of record as published may be found at https://10.1109/RAMS.2019.8768943International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE2019Increasingly tight coupling and heavy connectedness in systems of systems (SoS) presents new problems for systems designers and engineers. While the failure of one system within a SoS may produce little collateral damage beyond a loss in SoS capability, a highly interconnected SoS can experience significant damage when one member system fails in an unanticipated way. It is therefore important to develop systems that are "good neighbors" with the other systems in a SoS by failing in ways that do not further degrade a SoS’s ability to complete its mission. This paper presents a method to (1) analyze a system for potential spurious emissions and (2) choose mitigation strategies that provide the best return on investment for the SoS. The method is suited for use during the system architecture phase of the system design process. A functional and flow approach to analyzing spurious emissions and developing mitigation strategies is used in the method. Use of the method may result in a system that causes less SoS damage during a failure event

A Generative Human-in-the-Loop Approach for Conceptual Design Exploration Using Flow Failure Frequency in Functional Models

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4042913A challenge systems engineers and designers face when applying system failure risk assessment methods such as probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) during conceptual design is their reliance on historical data and behavioral models. This paper presents a framework for exploring a space of functional models using graph rewriting rules and a qualitative failure simulation framework that presents information in an intuitive manner for human-in-the-loop decision-making and human-guided design. An example is presented wherein a functional model of an electrical power system testbed is iteratively perturbed to generate alternatives. The alternative functional models suggest different approaches to mitigating an emergent system failure vulnerability in the electrical power system’s heat extraction capability. A preferred functional model configuration that has a desirable failure flow distribution can then be identified. The method presented here helps systems designers to better understand where failures propagate through systems and guides modification of systems functional models to adjust the way in which systems fail to have more desirable characteristics.This research is partially supported by the Naval Postgraduate School, the Singapore University of Technology and Design, the Technical University of Denmark, and Oregon State University

A hybrid problem-based and just-in-time inductive teaching method for failure analysis instruction

When engineers retire, they take their expert knowledge with them. Preservation of this expert knowledge in a usable form is beneficial for the advancement of any engineering field. Risk in Early Design (RED) is one method for preserving expert risk analysis knowledge. The first purpose of this paper is to examine the usability of RED when incorporated with a hybrid problem-based and just-in-time inductive teaching method for failure analysis instruction. The second purpose of this paper is to propose and perform steps toward verification and validation of the RED methodology and implementation. Evaluation metrics were developed, and several of these evaluation metrics were gathered in a case study. This case study was performed in a sophomore level lab class at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in the fall of 2010. The lab was designed to assist in teaching mechanics of materials, and was composed of approximately 200 students. Lab questions and a questionnaire were used to determine the students\u27 ability to assess and mitigate risk both with and without this teaching method. The questionnaire was also used to prioritize and uncover usability issues with RED, and initial improvements were made to the RED application based on this feedback. While students were unlikely to produce an accurate failure mode assessment with or without the teaching method, results showed that students were using RED to aid their failure assessments --Abstract, page iv

Systemizing and Automating the Concept Development Process Based on Product Configuration and User Feedback: Case Study on Automating the Design Process of Creating Concepts for a Kitchen Stand Mixer

Optimizing the development and evaluation of concepts during the design of consumer products through, e.g., topology optimization, often excludes areas associated with user needs (e.g., usability). This paper reports on an exploratory study of developing a system which can create new product concepts based on users’ preferences, requirements, and a clearly defined product structure. The 3D model of the product (structured using top-down design and resilient modeling) was integrated with calculations of the performance of the user needs (performance indicators). Different designs were developed based on design of experiment analyses and optimization analyses of the 3D model of the product (a kitchen stand mixer). The outcome of the analyses was a range of concepts which scored differently in the performance indicators. The best designs (based on Pareto front) were evaluated by six potential customers. Half of the participants preferred the same design, suggesting that this tool can be used to develop a design which a specific customer segment prefers. The process of creating the model and using it for customer interviews contributed a set of qualitative findings to the literature on combining parametric design, customization, and systematic design with user needs

Toward a functional failure analysis method of identifying and mitigating spurious system emissions in a system of systems

The article of record as published may be found at https://10.1109/RAMS.2019.8768943International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE2019Increasingly tight coupling and heavy connectedness in systems of systems (SoS) presents new problems for systems designers and engineers. While the failure of one system within a SoS may produce little collateral damage beyond a loss in SoS capability, a highly interconnected SoS can experience significant damage when one member system fails in an unanticipated way. It is therefore important to develop systems that are "good neighbors" with the other systems in a SoS by failing in ways that do not further degrade a SoS’s ability to complete its mission. This paper presents a method to (1) analyze a system for potential spurious emissions and (2) choose mitigation strategies that provide the best return on investment for the SoS. The method is suited for use during the system architecture phase of the system design process. A functional and flow approach to analyzing spurious emissions and developing mitigation strategies is used in the method. Use of the method may result in a system that causes less SoS damage during a failure event

Toward a generative human-in-the-loop approach for conceptual design exploration using flow failure frequency in functional models

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1115/DETC2018-85490Proceedings of the ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2018 August 26-29, 2018, Quebec City, Quebec, CanadaA challenge systems engineers and designers face when applying system failure risk assessment methods such as Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) during conceptual design is their reliance on historical data and behavioral models. This paper presents a framework for exploring a space of functional models using graph rewriting rules and a qualitative failure simulation framework that presents information in an intuitive manner for human-in-the-loop decision-making and human-guided design. An example is presented wherein a functional model of an electrical power system is iteratively perturbed to generate alternatives. The alternative functional models suggest different approaches to mitigating an emergent system failure vulnerability in the electrical power system’s the heat extraction capability. A preferred functional model configuration that has a desirable failure flow distribution can then be identified. The method presented here helps systems designers to better understand where failures propagate through systems and guides modification of systems functional models to adjust the way in which systems fail to have more desirable characteristics.Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).Naval Postgraduate School (NPS