Adaptive Peircean decision aid project summary assessments.

This efforts objective was to identify and hybridize a suite of technologies enabling the development of predictive decision aids for use principally in combat environments but also in any complex information terrain. The technologies required included formal concept analysis for knowledge representation and information operations, Peircean reasoning to support hypothesis generation, Mill's's canons to begin defining information operators that support the first two technologies and co-evolutionary game theory to provide the environment/domain to assess predictions from the reasoning engines. The intended application domain is the IED problem because of its inherent evolutionary nature. While a fully functioning integrated algorithm was not achieved the hybridization and demonstration of the technologies was accomplished and demonstration of utility provided for a number of ancillary queries

Cooperative Learning Approach to Delivering Professional Modules to Bachelor and Master Students: TPU Experience

Modern tendencies in engineering education set certain requirements on the competences to be obtained. To enable a future engineer to work at a highly competitive level and become an internationally recognized specialist, they must possess advanced English speaking and writing skills. At present most universities introduce educational programs that attract bright domestic and international students to ensure that they are in demand at the global market. The Strategic Program on Competitiveness Enhancement of National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University proposes that modules of professional training should be developed and delivered in English as a language of instruction so that the quality of teaching could be raised. To develop their own approaches to teaching, improve their language proficiency and develop courses and their elements in English, TPU teachers are to meet these challenging requirements and design course documentation and teaching aids, and engage modern teaching approaches in order to ensure high quality work with student groups which are often mixed in their abilities in both professional subjects and language proficiency levels. This paper addresses the course "Professional Training in English" which was developed upon completion of the joint program of TPU and the University of Southampton "Delivering through the Medium of English" and has successfully been delivered to bachelor students with the major "Oil and Gas Engineering" using the cooperative learning approach. The cooperative learning approach has proved to be one of the most successful in terms of teaching professional English to groups of students with mixed abilities

A development environment for operational concepts and systems engineering analysis.

The work reported in this document involves a development effort to provide combat commanders and systems engineers with a capability to explore and optimize system concepts that include operational concepts as part of the design effort. An infrastructure and analytic framework has been designed and partially developed that meets a gap in systems engineering design for combat related complex systems. The system consists of three major components: The first component consists of a design environment that permits the combat commander to perform 'what-if' types of analyses in which parts of a course of action (COA) can be automated by generic system constructs. The second component consists of suites of optimization tools designed to integrate into the analytical architecture to explore the massive design space of an integrated design and operational space. These optimization tools have been selected for their utility in requirements development and operational concept development. The third component involves the design of a modeling paradigm for the complex system that takes advantage of functional definitions and the coupled state space representations, generic measures of effectiveness and performance, and a number of modeling constructs to maximize the efficiency of computer simulations. The system architecture has been developed to allow for a future extension in which the operational concept development aspects can be performed in a co-evolutionary process to ensure the most robust designs may be gleaned from the design space(s)

Application of Fuzzy Technology to Risk-Based Design and Decision Problems

A study was undertaken to assess the impact of employing fuzzy technologies in areas of complex weapon system design. The technology was examined for use in a life-cycle cost exercise with the objective of providing a foundation from which to make service life assessments and recommendations on future weapon systems. The issues associated with this problem can be highly subjective and often exhibit a high degree of functional as well as variable uncertainty, ambiguity and noise. The study demonstrated that there is a potential role for the technology, but only in a hybridized environment not as a stand-alone solution methodology

GÖRNER, M. (Herausgeber) 2009 Atlas der Säugetiere Thüringens

GÖRNER, M. (Herausgeber) 2009 Atlas der Säugetiere Thüringen

Surety theoretics: The forest or the trees?

Periodically one needs to re-examine the objectives and the efforts associated with a field of study. In the case of surety which comprises, safety, security and reliability one needs to be sure that theoretical efforts support the needs of systems and design engineers in satisfying stakeholder requirements. The current focus in the surety areas does not appear to address the theoretical foundations needed by the systems engineer. Examination of papers and abstracts demonstrate significant effort along the lines of thermal hydraulics, chemistry, structural response, control theory, etc. which are analytical disciplines which provide support for a surety theoretic but do not constitute a theoretic. The representations currently employed, fault trees etc., define static representations of a system, not the dynamic representation characteristic of response in abnormal, hostile or under degrading conditions. Current methodologies would require a semi-infinite set of scenarios to be examined before a system could be certified as satisfying a surety requirement. The elements that are required of a surety theoretic must include: (1) a dynamic representation of the system; (2) the ability to automatically identify terminal states of the system; and (3) determine the probabilities of specified terminal states under dynamic conditions. This paper examines the requirements of a surety theoretic that will support the efforts of the design and development engineer. Speculations then follow on technologies that might provide the theoretical and support foundations needed by the systems engineering community to form a robust surety analysis and design environment

Systems engineering analysis of kinetic energy weapon concepts

This study examines, from a systems engineering design perspective, the potential of kinetic energy weapons being used in the role of a conventional strategic weapon. Within the Department of Energy (DOE) complex, strategic weapon experience falls predominantly in the nuclear weapons arena. The techniques developed over the years may not be the most suitable methodologies for use in a new design/development arena. For this reason a more fundamental approach was pursued with the objective of developing an information base from which design decisions might be made concerning the conventional strategic weapon system concepts. The study examined (1) a number of generic missions, (2) the effects of a number of damage mechanisms from a physics perspective, (3) measures of effectiveness (MOE`s), and (4) a design envelope for kinetic energy weapon concepts. With the base of information a cut at developing a set of high-level system requirements was made, and a number of concepts were assessed against these requirements

Systems engineering: A problem of perception

The characterization of systems engineering as a discipline, process, procedure or a set of heuristics will have an impact on the implementation strategy, the training methodology, and operational environment. The systems engineering upgrade activities in the New Mexico Weapons Development Center and a search of systems engineering related information provides evidence of a degree of ambiguity in this characterization of systems engineering. A case is made in this article for systems engineering being the engineering discipline applied to the science of complexity. Implications of this characterization and some generic issues are delineated with the goal of providing an enterprise with a starting point for developing its business environment