A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design
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2012-austinBrenemanEtal-JMD.pdf
Size
453.44 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
da7a0363382c0a4a127bc5d485547ff4
Author(s)
Honda, Tomonori
Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren
Yang, Maria
Date Issued
November 2012
Journal
Journal of Mechanical Design
Publisher
ASME International
Citation
Austin-Breneman, Jesse, Tomonori Honda, and Maria C. Yang. “A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design.” Journal of Mechanical Design 134, no. 12 (November 15, 2012): 124504.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Large-scale engineering systems require design teams to balance complex sets of considerations using a wide range of design and decision-making skills. Formal, computational approaches for optimizing complex systems offer strategies for arriving at optimal solutions in situations where system integration and design optimization are well-formulated. However, observation of design practice suggests engineers may be poorly prepared for this type of design. Four graduate student teams completed a distributed, complex system design task. Analysis of the teams' design histories suggests three categories of suboptimal approaches: global rather than local searches, optimizing individual design parameters separately, and sequential rather than concurrent optimization strategies. Teams focused strongly on individual subsystems rather than system-level optimization, and did not use the provided system gradient indicator to understand how changes in individual subsystems impacted the overall system. This suggests the need for curriculum to teach engineering students how to appropriately integrate systems as a whole.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4007840
