Collaborative Research: Randomized Distributed Data Structures for Product Design

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The objective of this collaborative project is to make product take-back and reuse economically and environmentally viable. It is important for engineering design because although component reuse and remanufacture can potentially decrease cost, decrease environmental impact, and increase customer satisfaction, computational issues have limited design analysis to a single set of static, industry-average model inputs. Real world implementation requires dynamic input from a variety of widely distributed data sources. Tasks to be completed include: development of a system for making decisions regarding component recycle, reuse, remanufacturing or disposal that utilizes data from widely distributed sources; rigorous specification of shared objects that have probabilistic behavior; development of efficient and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms to implement the shared objects; development of a design system that increases customer satisfaction by utilizing feedback from multiple sources throughout the product lifecycle.Broader impacts include recovering the economic value that is currently wasted in discarded products, decreasing both consumer costs and environmental impacts. Also, the scalability of our computing infrastructure will be expanded. This project will be integrated into an industrially sponsored senior design course, so technology transfer to students and industry will be broad and timely. The educational infrastructure will be enhanced by development of new interdisciplinary course materials for both undergraduate and graduate courses in two different departments (General Engineering and Computer Science). Underrepresented groups will benefit by the PI's presentations of this research, whose social relevance is known to motivate women and minority students to pursue engineering studies.