A Study of Student Design Team Behaviors in Complex System Design
Author(s)
Honda, Tomonori; Austin-Breneman, Jesse Lauren; Yang, Maria
Download2012-austinBrenemanEtal-JMD.pdf (453.4Kb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.
Date issued
2012-11Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems DivisionJournal
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
ISSN
1050-0472