CAREER: Modeling the Dynamics of Design and Systems Engineering Processes

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The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to model the dynamics of design and development processes for large-scale complex engineered systems to enable improved engineering design. The research will leverage methods and results from the fields of dynamical systems, multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization (MDAO), and management science. If successful, the primary innovation will be to relate key design factors to the dynamical behavior of systems engineering processes. These factors include: (1) the system requirements; (2) the development funding profile; (3) the technology development roadmap; (4) the system decomposition and organization of design teams; (5) the incentive structures for the design teams; (6) the systems engineering management approach; and (7) the physical characteristics and performance of the design itself. The research will investigate approaches to cast the development process as a state space model dependent on these multidisciplinary factors. The resulting model will be suitable to quantify characteristics including steady-state response, stability, and reachability and controllability. The model will be used to study historical aerospace development projects to calibrate model parameters, validate the modeling approach, and gain insights into causes for past programmatic cost and schedule overruns. If successful, the research will provide an intellectual bridge between the process-centric methods of industrial dynamics and the product-centric viewpoint of multidisciplinary design. The work will also provide a foundation for the study of feedback and optimal control strategies for systems engineering management. The dynamics model may hold the potential to understand the root causes of the cost and schedule overruns that frequently occur in the development of engineered systems such as aircraft and spacecraft. The educational objective is to encourage students to pursue technical careers by illustrating the important societal role of engineers through pedagogical case studies and vignettes based on the historical development projects used in the research tasks. The results will be broudly disseminated to achieve the greatest impact.