Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) MIT Research Studies Applicable to Systems Engineering

This publication contains abstracts for past research thesis projects related to systems engineering completed within the LAI research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Workshop Report Air Force/LAI Workshop on Systems Engineering for Robustness

Workshop repor

Technical Report Value of Systems Engineering

This report is a follow-on from the June 2004 Air Force/Lean Aerospace Initiative Workshop on Systems Engineering for Robustness

The Value of Resolving Uncertainty in Social-Ecological Systems

Conservation is increasingly framed or analyzed as a coupled social-ecological problem. However, considering the broader links between social and ecological systems reveals additional and increasing dimensions of uncertainty for conservation management. Reducing uncertainty is expected to lead to improved management decisions, however collecting more data or lengthening project time frames to reduce uncertainty is not without cost. In this study we analyze where conservation managers should invest resources to improve management outcomes by decreasing uncertainty in a coupled social-ecological system. We consider five system components: social and ecological nodes and links, and social-ecological links. We find that the expected value of improving information for any one component is always highest for the component which is most directly acted upon by managers. Our results can help guide conservation investment to reduce uncertainty where improved knowledge of a social-ecological system will provide the greatest improvement in management outcomes

Network Centric Operations and the Brigade Unit of Action: A System Dynamics Perspective

In the midst of fighting a global War on Terror, the U.S. Army is concurrently attempting to transform to a more agile and deployable organization, which is centered largely on the integration of new information technologies into its command posts. While most Army leaders are reporting that many of these new information “tools” such as the Army Battle Command System (ABCS) give them an unprecedented level of situational awareness and are beginning to enable a new style of war labeled by some as Network Centric Warfare, other leaders are reporting that the integration of this new digital technology comes with some unintended consequences that in some cases actually slows and decreases the quality of information flow by orders of magnitude. We studied the “Brigade Unit of Action” concept with specific emphasis on the Brigade’s ability to disseminate and process information within and between command posts, using System Dynamics as a modeling tool to help better understand the impact of various policy decisions made by the U.S. Army. Our study concentrated on some of the possible strengths and pitfalls of NCW theory, and led to the formulation of five heuristics that Army leaders should consider when developing the future command and control architecture for the Brigade Unit of Action

The Big Picture: Historical View of Systems Thinking and Social Competencies in Research and Practice

MIT LAI and SEAri Research presentatio

Session on Revitalizing Systems Engineering

LAI 2004 Plenary Conference presentation agend

Selective Metal Cation Capture by Soft Anionic Metal-Organic Frameworks via Drastic Single-Crystal-to-Single-Crystal Transformations

In this paper we describe a novel framework for the discovery of the topical content of a data corpus, and the tracking of its complex structural changes across the temporal dimension. In contrast to previous work our model does not impose a prior on the rate at which documents are added to the corpus nor does it adopt the Markovian assumption which overly restricts the type of changes that the model can capture. Our key technical contribution is a framework based on (i) discretization of time into epochs, (ii) epoch-wise topic discovery using a hierarchical Dirichlet process-based model, and (iii) a temporal similarity graph which allows for the modelling of complex topic changes: emergence and disappearance, evolution, and splitting and merging. The power of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the medical literature corpus concerned with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - an increasingly important research subject of significant social and healthcare importance. In addition to the collected ASD literature corpus which we will make freely available, our contributions also include two free online tools we built as aids to ASD researchers. These can be used for semantically meaningful navigation and searching, as well as knowledge discovery from this large and rapidly growing corpus of literature.Comment: In Proc. Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 201

Establishing Systems Competency in Enterprises: Recent Studies

The practice of systems engineering has evolved significantly over the past decade in response to new challenges, yet at the same time the engineering workforce has declined. Several studies also cite an erosion of engineering competency, particularly in government and aerospace/defense industry. The development of systems competency is critical; yet, we lack the empirical basis for developing a truly informed strategy for addressing this need. This talk will describe past and ongoing research on systems thinking and practice that is focused on informing the development of competency models and collaboration models. Competency models define the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed by individual systems professionals in an enterprise. Collaboration models specify success factors for groups and teams within and across enterprises who collectively work on a common objective. Establishing systems competency in enterprises involves empirical studies and case based research for the purpose of understanding how to achieve more effective systems engineering practice through understanding of the context in which systems engineering is performed and understanding the factors underlying the competency of the systems workforce. The talk will discuss three recent and ongoing research studies with highlights of interim research outcomes. The first research effort is focused on building empirical knowledge of the enablers, barriers and precursors of the development of systems thinking in individual engineers, and thus far included a study within the aerospace industry (Davidz 2006), and extended in an exploratory study within an aerospace government agency. A second line of research is looking at effective socio-technical practices of collaborative distributed systems engineering, that is, where teams are non-geographically collocated (Utter 2007). A third research project (Lamb 2008/ongoing) seeks to develop an empirical basis for collaborative systems thinking, defined as “an emergent behavior of teams resulting from the interactions of team members and utilizing a variety of thinking styles, design processes, tools, and languages to consider system attributes, interrelationships, context and dynamics towards executing systems design”. These recent and ongoing LAI studies seek to impact the effectiveness of individuals and groups to strengthen performance of modern enterprises involved in acquiring and developing complex systems

CCL2 recruits inflammatory monocytes to facilitate breast-tumour metastasis

Macrophages abundantly found in the tumor microenvironment enhance malignancy(1). At metastatic sites a distinct population of metastasis associated macrophages (MAMs) promote tumor cell extravasation, seeding and persistent growth(2). Our study has defined the origin of these macrophages by showing Gr1+ inflammatory monocytes (IMs) are preferentially recruited to pulmonary metastases but not primary mammary tumors, a process also found for human IMs in pulmonary metastases of human breast cancer cells. The recruitment of these CCR2 (receptor for chemokine CCL2) expressing IMs and subsequently MAMs and their interaction with metastasizing tumor cells is dependent on tumor and stromal synthesized CCL2 (FigS1). Inhibition of CCL2/CCR2 signaling using anti-CCL2 antibodies blocks IM recruitment and inhibits metastasis in vivo and prolongs the survival of tumor-bearing mice. Depletion of tumor cell-derived CCL2 also inhibits metastatic seeding. IMs promote tumor cell extravasation in a process that requires monocyte-derived VEGF. CCL2 expression and macrophage infiltration are correlated with poor prognosis and metastatic disease in human breast cancer (Fig S2)(3-6). Our data provides the mechanistic link between these two clinical associations and indicates new therapeutic targets for treating metastatic breast disease