A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design
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 integr...
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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ASME International
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86150 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-3423 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-1378 |
| _version_ | 1811071312686219264 |
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| author | Honda, Tomonori Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren Yang, Maria |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering Honda, Tomonori Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren Yang, Maria |
| author_sort | Honda, Tomonori |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:49:12Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/86150 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:49:12Z |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publisher | ASME International |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/861502022-09-23T14:44:36Z A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design Honda, Tomonori Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren Yang, Maria Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division Yang, Maria Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren Honda, Tomonori Yang, Maria 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. National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CMMI-0830134) National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CMMI-0900255) Ford Foundation (Predoctoral Fellowship) 2014-04-14T16:23:58Z 2014-04-14T16:23:58Z 2012-11 2012-08 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1050-0472 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86150 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. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-3423 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-1378 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1115/1.4007840 Journal of Mechanical Design Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf ASME International Prof. Yang via Angie Locknar |
| spellingShingle | Honda, Tomonori Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren Yang, Maria A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title | A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title_full | A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title_fullStr | A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title_short | A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design |
| title_sort | study of student design team behaviors in complex system design |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86150 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-3423 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-1378 |
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