EAGER: Model-based Foundations of Collective Systems Design Theory

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This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant supports fundamental research to create and validate models of collaboration in engineering systems design. Engineering systems encompass a broad class of real-world systems which go beyond traditional boundaries of engineered artifacts to interact with and contribute to key societal functions. Performance is partially driven by technical capabilities but also by social constructs including policies, markets, incentives, and objectives. Pursuing shared objectives such as sustainability or security requires collective efforts among a diverse set of actors representing multiple firms, organizations, and agencies with potentially conflicting individual objectives. Existing systems engineering approaches do not align well with the decentralized nature and barriers to information exchange inherent to engineering systems. Consequently, engineering systems development often results in systems that are more costly than anticipated, take longer to develop than anticipated, and fail to meet desired levels of performance. This project contributes a mathematical framework and preliminary experimental results to understand how collaborative, systems-based approaches can achieve shared objectives in the design of engineering systems. This project will yield basic results that are applicable to many kinds of engineering systems, including but not limited to transportation systems, energy systems and defense systems.The objective of this project is to understand how the structure of a design problem and interactions among design actors can facilitate or inhibit collective action. A mathematical framework characterizes a multi-actor system design problem as a set of design decisions and value flows contributing to strategic behavior. It builds on a game-theoretic model of system design as a two-part decision: lower-level decisions choose designs to maximize value in a fixed context and higher-level decisions choose a collective strategy to maximize value under interactive effects. This project considers simplified two-player design problems structured to represent four canonical coordination games. A human subjects experiment asks role-players to complete a series of pair design problems to maximize individual objectives. Results analyze how the problem structure and observed interactions influence the balance between cooperative versus non-cooperative strategies while controlling for demographic and personality factors believed to affect individual and collective performance. Understanding how technical and organizational factors influence designer behaviors will contribute to improved mechanisms and incentives to achieve desired collective results.