CAREER: Designing Flexible Complex Systems with Coupled and Co-Evolving Subsystems under Operational Uncertainties

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This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant will address a grand challenge in complex system design: enabling the design of flexible large-scale complex systems under future operational uncertainties in demands, environment, and performance. With growing global trends in increased complexity of engineering systems and their prolonged service lives, staged deployment and co-evolution have become an economic option for the development of such large-scale systems. Deploying the system progressively in stages, starting from affordable stages, enhances flexibility and mitigates potential risks against an unknown and evolving future. A broad range of industries (e.g., public infrastructure, healthcare, aerospace, and defense) suffer from high development costs and large operational uncertainties in the deployment of these systems, however. There is an imperative need for a rigorous built-in flexibility design methodology to optimize and coordinate the flexible subsystem-level design and co-deployment that ensure system-level performance; this problem is extremely challenging due to its prohibitive computational complexity. How can engineers design a flexible complex system with coupled subsystems and its staged deployment plan in a rigorous and scalable way? This program seeks to answer this question in order to transform complex system design and enable systems to adapt effectively to future uncertainties. The program will develop a novel scalable design framework and associated computational techniques for staged deployment optimization of flexible large-scale complex systems by efficiently handling operational uncertainties at the early design stage. The created local scenario discretization scheme offers a unique computationally efficient approach to manage staged co-deployment by decoupling weak dynamic interaction among subsystems. Moreover, the decomposition-based design method introduces an innovative bottom-up staged-deployment design, leading to a parallelizable and more scalable design approach than the traditional top-down approaches. The resulting unified flexible design optimization methodology will bridge the gap between high-level flexibility analysis and detailed-level design decisions. An integrated educational component of the project will directly impact STEM educational curriculum and K-12 outreach activity planning by applying the researched flexible staged-deployment concepts to transform the traditional fixed syllabus-based pedagogy into a flexible and modular one. The developed flexible pedagogy will enable the education and outreach activities to adapt to the diverse and uncertain needs, interests, and backgrounds of the students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.