Collaborative Research: Organizational and Uncertainty Impacts of Couplings in a System Design Framework

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The research objective of this collaborative project is to investigate three hypotheses focusing on the impact of organizational couplings and physics-based couplings on decision-making under uncertainty in the design of large-scale complex engineered systems. Methods to measure loss in value of a system design due to fixed requirements as well as to organizational incentives are to be developed and tested. Three research objectives are pursued as follows: 1) evaluate the impact of incorporating physics-based coupling information in a system value model to better enable trade-offs; 2) incorporate uncertainties associated with physics-based couplings to determine impact on system value; and 3) evaluate the impact of fixed requirements on the system design. The work will provide foundational theoretical and empirical investigations into the theory of large-scale systems design using a value-based approach. The research will identify the value gap due to organizational and technical couplings and the associated impact on the resulting system design, thereby providing a clear basis for changing present practice.If successful, the results of this research will demonstrate that requirements, organizational structure, and incentive structures can seriously impact the system value and hence, system design. Further, the research will offer alternatives to mitigate this impact, thereby enabling an increase in system value and improved system design. This can have significant impact on industries and federal agencies engaged in the design of complex engineered systems. For these engineered systems, during the detailed design stage, there may be thousands of individuals working in a team environment distributed across multiple organizations, with many of these geographically and temporally distributed, wherein these individuals operate with different preferences, beliefs, organizational structures, and incentive structures. This research can potentially result in improved theory, methods, and processes to continuity across an organization, regardless of structure, to produce the greatest system value. The results will be disseminated through a variety of conference and journal mechanisms, with the most significant outreach effort focused on a website that will also contain a "common language" established to span fields of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO), Value-Driven Design (VDD), and Decision Analysis (DA). Papers and tools produced will also be on this website. Outreach to students from under-represented groups will be a key effort, using the special emphasis of social sciences challenges being addressed together with technical issues.