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

该学院早期职业发展计划（Career）资助将解决复杂系统设计中的一个重大挑战：在需求、环境和性能的未来操作不确定性下，实现灵活的大规模复杂系统的设计。随着工程系统复杂性和使用寿命的日益增长，阶段部署和协同演化已成为开发此类大型系统的一种经济选择。从负担得起的阶段开始，分阶段逐步部署系统，提高了灵活性，并减轻了面对未知和不断变化的未来的潜在风险。然而，许多行业（例如，公共基础设施、医疗保健、航空航天和国防）在部署这些系统时都面临着高昂的开发成本和巨大的操作不确定性。迫切需要一种严格的内置灵活性设计方法来优化和协调灵活的子系统级设计和协同部署，以确保系统级性能；由于其令人望而却步的计算复杂性，这个问题极具挑战性。工程师如何以严格和可扩展的方式设计具有耦合子系统及其阶段部署计划的灵活复杂系统？该计划旨在回答这个问题，以改变复杂的系统设计，使系统能够有效地适应未来的不确定性。该项目将开发一种新颖的可扩展设计框架和相关的计算技术，通过有效地处理早期设计阶段的操作不确定性，为灵活的大规模复杂系统的阶段部署优化提供支持。所创建的局部场景离散化方案通过解耦子系统之间的弱动态交互，为管理分阶段协同部署提供了一种独特的计算效率方法。此外，基于分解的设计方法引入了一种创新的自底向上的阶段部署设计，与传统的自顶向下的方法相比，这种设计方法具有可并行性和可扩展性。由此产生的统一的柔性设计优化方法将弥合高级柔性分析和详细级设计决策之间的差距。该项目的综合教育部分将直接影响STEM教育课程和K-12外展活动规划，通过应用研究的灵活阶段部署概念，将传统的固定教学大纲教学法转变为灵活和模块化的教学法。灵活的教学方法将使教育和外展活动能够适应学生多样化和不确定的需求、兴趣和背景。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.