U.S.-Germany Program: Dissertation Research in Industrial Engineering

该奖项支持北卡罗来纳州立大学（NCSU） Robert Young教授的研究生Ronald Giachetti在德国亚琛工业大学的机床和生产工程实验室进行为期六个月的研究，那里的专业知识和设施将大大提高他的博士论文工作。Young先生的研究（以及参与的美国和德国研究小组的研究）的目标是设计一种方法来满足并行工程的巨大信息管理需求。他特别关注一种方法来统一两种不同类型的数据管理系统：面向对象的数据库和基于约束的处理系统。亚琛技术大学（Technical University of Aachen）正在开发一个大型系统来实现这种方法，该系统基于德国研究小组在面向对象数据库方面的专业知识及其在并发工程挑战中的应用。由Paul Young教授领导的NCSU研究小组在约束技术方面拥有丰富的专业知识。杨教授目前正在休假期间与德国小组一起工作。这个奖项将使Giachetti先生，一个非常有前途的美国研究生，加入他，并获得宝贵的专业和国际经验。并行工程包括在设计阶段同时考虑产品的“生命周期功能”。目标是改进设计，降低产品成本，缩短产品上市时间。这些阶段中的每一个都包含了大量的信息，而且往往是不同的甚至是相互冲突的目标。管理这些数量巨大且种类繁多的信息是实现并行工程的主要问题之一。该提案结合了美国和德国最先进的专业知识，解决了这些信息需求。

This award supports Ronald Giachetti, a graduate student of Professor Robert Young at North Carolina State University (NCSU), to spend six months carrying out research at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering of the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, where the expertise and facilities will greatly enhance his doctoral dissertation work. The goal of Mr. Young's research (and that of the participating U.S. and German research groups) is to design an approach to satisfy the huge information management requirements of concurrent engineering. In particular, he is focusing on an approach for uniting two different types of data management systems: the object-oriented database and the constraint-based processing system. The Technical University of Aachen is in the process of developing a large system to implement such an approach, building on the German research group's expertise in object-oriented databases and their application to the challenge of concurrent engineering. The research group at NCSU headed by Professor Paul Young has developed substantial expertise in constraint technology. Professor Young is currently spending a sabbatical visit working with the German group. This award will enable Mr. Giachetti, a very promising U.S. graduate student, to join him and gain valuable professional and international experience. Concurrent engineering involves the simultaneous consideration of the `life-cycle functions` of a product during the design phase. The goal is to improve the design, reduce the cost of the product and shorten the time to market. Each of these stages involves tremendous amounts of information and, often, different or even conflicting goals. Managing this enormous amount and variety of information is one of the main problems in implementing concurrent engineering. This proposal addresses these information requirements with an approach that combines state-of-the-art expertise from the U.S. and Germany.