Evaluation Of Design Alternatives Research Articles

Impact of neighborhood design on energy performance and GHG emissions

This paper presents an innovative and holistic approach to the analysis of the impact of selected design parameters of a new solar community on its environmental performance, in terms of energy efficiency and carbon footprint (green-house gas (GHG) emissions). The design parameters include energy performance level of buildings, density, type of the neighborhood (mixed-use vs residential), location of the commercial center relative to residential areas and the design of the streets. Energy performance is measured as the balance between overall energy consumption for building operations (assuming an all-electric neighborhood) and electricity generation potential through integration of PV panels on available roof surfaces. Greenhouse gas emissions are those associated with building operations and transport.Results of simulations carried out on prototype neighborhoods located in the vicinity of Calgary, Alberta, Canada indicate that, while adopting high-energy efficiency measures can reduce the buildings’ impact by up to 75% in terms of energy consumption and GHG emissions, transport still has a large environmental impact. The parameters of highest impact on transport and its associated GHG emissions are the design of the neighborhood and the distance to the business center. Density, as isolated parameter, has a modest effect on the selected mode of transportation, in terms of using private or public transportation.While this study relates to a specific location and a range of design assumptions, the methodology employed can serve as a template for evaluating design alternatives of new sustainable developments and their environmental impact.

Evidential reasoning-based Fuzzy AHP approach for the evaluation of design alternatives’ environmental performances

With the growing general awareness of the need to protect the environment as well as the increasingly stringent regulatory requirements imposed by various national and cross-national bodies, manufacturers have to minimise the environmental impacts of their products. Environmental considerations have therefore become a new key criterion for evaluating design alternatives during the product development stage. To facilitate non-Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) experts, such as most product designers, in evaluating the design alternatives in terms of environmental friendliness, this paper introduces a decision-making mechanism that combines the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches with LCA methodology. This evidential reasoning-based approach is a fast-track and objective tool which ranks the available design alternatives according to their potential environmental impacts. The environmental impacts of design alternatives assessed by the LCA are used for the weight elicitation processes of the proposed approach. A case application is conducted to illustrate the use of the proposed method to evaluate the environmental performances of design alternatives.

Automotive style design assessment and sensitivity analysis using integrated analytic hierarchy process and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution

Product style characteristics have a large impact on product function. Making an objective and precise assessment of style characteristic has become an increasing importance to improve the production efficiency and reduce environmental pollution. This work proposes a framework built by analytic hierarchy process and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution methods, that is, analytical hierarchy process and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution, to evaluate automotive style design alternatives’ performance, together with automotive style design characteristics. Analytic hierarchy process is applied to obtain weights of the performance, and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution is adopted to rank the design alternatives. A case study is illustrated to test and verify the proposed method. Simultaneously, sensitivity analysis is provided to monitor the robustness of this method. The results show that it provides an effective and feasible method for evaluation of automotive style design alternatives’ performance.

Applying CBR to machine tool product configuration design oriented to customer requirements

Product customization is a trend in the current market-oriented manufacturing environment. However, deduction from customer requirements to design results and evaluation of design alternatives are still heavily reliant on the designer’s experience and knowledge. To solve the problem of fuzziness and uncertainty of customer requirements in product configuration, an analysis method based on the grey rough model is presented. The customer requirements can be converted into technical characteristics effectively. In addition, an optimization decision model for product planning is established to help the enterprises select the key technical characteristics under the constraints of cost and time to serve the customer to maximal satisfaction. A new case retrieval approach that combines the self-organizing map and fuzzy similarity priority ratio method is proposed in case-based design. The self-organizing map can reduce the retrieval range and increase the retrieval efficiency, and the fuzzy similarity priority ratio method can evaluate the similarity of cases comprehensively. To ensure that the final case has the best overall performance, an evaluation method of similar cases based on grey correlation analysis is proposed to evaluate similar cases to select the most suitable case. Furthermore, a computer-aided system is developed using MATLAB GUI to assist the product configuration design. The actual example and result on an ETC series machine tool product show that the proposed method is effective, rapid and accurate in the process of product configuration. The proposed methodology provides a detailed instruction for the product configuration design oriented to customer requirements.

Multicriteria Decision-Making Methodology for Systems Engineering

A multicriteria decision-making methodology is proposed for decision making in systems engineering. A process is proposed for generating weights for evaluation criteria needed to evaluate design alternatives. A decision-maker classification is proposed based on the roles they play during the decision process. In order to accomplish this, in the first step, stakeholders' categorization is made, and their corresponding weights are determined representing their stake in decision. In the next step, each stakeholders' preference over the criteria set is determined, which leads to the ordinal rankings of the criteria for each stakeholder. In the following step, the stakeholders' criteria ordinal rankings are transformed into cardinal weights using the different decreasing utility functions. Thus, obtained final criteria weights are used for evaluation of the alternative design solutions. Optimality check measures are devised to select the appropriate decreasing utility functions.

측면 위어를 넘나드는 천수 흐름에 대한 2차원 수치모의

It was reviewed for the 2D numerical simulations to evaluate the effects of flood control by detention basin, even if stage-discharge relationships for the side weir were not known. A 2D depth-integrated numerical model was constructed by the application of the finite volume method to the shallow water equations as a numerical method and the introduction of an approximate Riemann solver for the accurate calculation of fluxes. Results by the model were compared with those by the laboratory test for the cases of free overflow and submerged flow over a side weir between the channel and storage. The difference between simulated and measured discharge coefficients for the case of free overflow is very small. In addition, the results by simulations were in good agreement with those by experiments for the submerged flow over a side weir and its mechanism was reproduced well. Through this study the discharge coefficients of side weirs can be accurately determined by the 2D numerical model and a considerable degree of accuracy can be achieved to evaluate the effect of flood defenses by detention basins. Thus, it will be expected to apply this model practically to the plan of detention basins, the evaluation of design alternatives, or the management of the existing ones.

A Case Study on BIM-enabled Evaluation of Design Alternatives for an Actual Remodeling Project in Korea - Focusing on the Spatial Program Review in Early Phase of Design -

This paper depicts a case study of the BIM (Building Information Modeling)-enabled evaluation of design alternatives for an actual remodeling project in Yeongwol, Korea. The increase of urban population and income followed by the growth of economy has derived massive supply of grand scale housing project in Korea since 1970s. Consequently, building remodeling became one of the feasible resolutions for renovating such old housings in these days. This paper aims to introduce a technical approach to such remodeling projects based on BIM-enabled applications focusing on quantitative analysis of design alternatives. Among the technical issues of such building remodeling projects, this paper focuses on the BIM-enabled area analysis and comparison between design alternatives to support decision-making even in early phase of remodeling design process. BIM and its variety of applications have broadly influenced the domain of AEC-FM (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management) within the lifecycle of buildings. As one of the applications facilitated by BIM, the automated area calculation and scenario-based comparison between alternatives can play an important role in the early phase of remodeling project. We modeled three design alternatives (buildings) and three housing modules (units) based on the actual case in Yeongwol city, Korea using a BIM design authoring tool. Nine combinatorial BIM models were demonstrated for the BIM-enabled review process described in this paper. To determine the most optimal design scenario among nine alternatives, this paper demonstrates a result of the conducted spatial program review. The main subject includes specific spatial program issues on; 1) the number of unit spaces; and 2) area of individual/grouped and private/shared spaces.

A method of probabilistic risk assessment for energy performance and cost using building energy simulation

Energy efficient buildings rely on simulation to predict energy performance. However, problems associated with simulation tools can lead to surprises when discrepancies are found between actual and predicted building energy performance; this frustrates building owners, investors, and designers.A probabilistic method of risk assessment for the calculation of energy use intensity and total utility cost in energy performance has been developed. Sensitive and uncertain parameters were selected and given a probability distribution instead of one fixed value for the simulations. Latin hypercube sampling was used to generate input combinations with parameter values picked stochastically from distributions based on the Monte Carlo method. With these input combinations, 10,000 simulations on seven distributed parameters were run using a cloud processing service. The output data, energy use intensity and energy cost, were analyzed using curve-fitting techniques to find a best-fit distribution, which could be used for risk analysis of energy performance and cost. The results illustrate the probability and reliability of prediction within a specific range. Instead of relying on a single value, these curves would help designers better evaluate design alternatives, and the probability distribution of energy performance and cost would be useful in making decisions about investments for energy efficient projects.

Energy-Aware Signal Integrity Analysis for High-Speed PCB Links

This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate design alternatives for high-speed links on printed circuit boards. The approach combines evaluations of signal integrity and link input power. For a comprehensive analysis, different link designs are made comparable through the application of identical constraints, with the link input power as the single figure of merit for a systematic, quantitative comparison of design alternatives. The analysis relies upon a combination of efficient physics-based via and trace models, statistical time-domain simulation, and an analytical input power evaluation, which allows it to handle links consisting of a large number of channels while fully taking into account interchannel crosstalk. The proposed approach is applied to study two fundamental design decisions at the PCB level—single-ended versus differential signaling and signal-to-ground via ratios of 1:1 versus 2:1—for a link consisting of 2048 vias and up to 175 striplines with an aggregate data rate of 1 Tb/s. It is found that both design decisions have a considerable impact on the required input power of the link.

On the role of computational support for designers in action

Designers' actions are high-level mechanisms based on heuristics and assumptions learned from professional experience. Significant research has been devoted to understanding these actions as well as finding ways to aid, automate, or augment them with computational support. However, representing and manipulating such tacit knowledge in computational environments remains an open area of research. In this paper, we map designers' actions and relationships to compare them with computational approaches for the generation, evaluation, and selection of design alternatives, and attempt to integrate all of the above. The analysis provides a more thorough understanding of the role of computational approaches in supporting designer actions and identifies challenges and areas of future research.

Estimating Life Cycle Cost of Improved Field Irrigation Canal

The globe is facing an increase in water demand associated with an increase in the world population especially in developing countries. The increasing population urges an additional agricultural land and irrigation water. Traditional system of irrigation water supplier is open canals which allow a high percentage of water dissipation and evaporation. This paper presents a new approach to evaluate design alternatives of Improved Field Irrigation Canals (IFIC) using Life Cycle Cost (LCC) methods. LCC is a methodology for calculating the total cost of a system from inception to disposal taking into account the time value of money. The main objective of this paper is using LCC to evaluate irrigation improvement canals to save water and increase agricultural production. Four methods such: i) Net Present Value (NPV); ii) Benefit/Cost ratio (BCR); iii) Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and iv) Pay Back Period (PBP) are used to compare between three IFIC design alternatives. These alternatives are i) pipeline with one pump at canal head, ii) pipeline with one pump at the head and one pump at the middle, and iii) lined open canal and compared to the reference case; i.e. open canal. Results show that the best economic alternative for IFIC is pipeline with one pump at the intake of the canal.

Incorporating climate change projections into riparian restoration planning and design

AbstractClimate change and associated changes in streamflow may alter riparian habitats substantially in coming decades. Riparian restoration provides opportunities to respond proactively to projected climate change effects, increase riparian ecosystem resilience to climate change, and simultaneously address effects of both climate change and other human disturbances. However, climate change may alter which restoration methods are most effective and which restoration goals can be achieved. Incorporating climate change into riparian restoration planning and design is critical to long‐term restoration of desired community composition and ecosystem services.In this review, we discuss and provide examples of how climate change might be incorporated into restoration planning at the key stages of assessing the project context, establishing restoration goals and design criteria, evaluating design alternatives, and monitoring restoration outcomes. Restoration planners have access to numerous tools to predict future climate, streamflow, and riparian ecology at restoration sites. Planners can use those predictions to assess which species or ecosystem services will be most vulnerable under future conditions, and which sites will be most suitable for restoration. To accommodate future climate and streamflow change, planners may need to adjust methods for planting, invasive species control, channel and floodplain reconstruction, and water management. Given the considerable uncertainty in future climate and streamflow projections, riparian ecological responses, and effects on restoration outcomes, planners will need to consider multiple potential future scenarios, implement a variety of restoration methods, design projects with flexibility to adjust to future conditions, and plan to respond adaptively to unexpected change. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Activity based & behavioural occupancy modelling for EE building design

Analysis of building energy efficiency at the early stages of the design process has been viewed in the past few years with increasing interest by key stakeholders such as architects, designers and mechanical engineers as well as by the research community. Early design products comprise features that determine to a large extend energy performance and thus can provide critical evidence to simulation and analysis tools for thorough evaluation of design alternatives. Capitalizing on the actual effect of building occupancy (human presence and movement) in the overall energy consumption during the early design phases of a building, this paper addresses the need for a common set of reference models definition for correlating the two disjoint worlds in the building domain, the building information models and the business processes models of an organization that will be housed in the building. The paper introduces a set of domain semantically enriched models that can express occupancy using spatio-temporal information and incorporate space utilization definitions taking into account enterprise-related information at various levels. To cope with interoperability with existing simulation tools, a provisional extension to the green building schema (gbXML) is examined towards incorporating the necessary information needed for realistic and accurate evaluation and optimization of alternative energy efficient building designs.

A multi-scale adaptive model of residential energy demand

Abstract In this paper, we extend a previously developed bottom-up energy demand model such that the model can be used to determine changes in behavioral and energy usage patterns of a community when: (i) new load patterns from P lug-in E lectrical V ehicles ( PEV ) or other devices are introduced; (ii) new technologies and smart devices are used within premises; and (iii) new D emand S ide M anagement ( DSM ) strategies, such as price responsive demand are implemented. Unlike time series forecasting methods that solely rely on historical data, the model only uses a minimal amount of data at the atomic level for its basic constructs. These basic constructs can be integrated into a household unit or a community model using rules and connectors that are, in principle, flexible and can be altered according to the type of questions that need to be answered. Furthermore, the embedded dynamics of the model works on the basis of: (i) Markovian stochastic model for simulating human activities, (ii) Bayesian and logistic technology adoption models, and (iii) optimization, and rule-based models to respond to price signals without compromising users’ comfort. The proposed model is not intended to replace traditional forecasting models. Instead it provides an analytical framework that can be used at the design stage of new products and communities to evaluate design alternatives. The framework can also be used to answer questions such as why demand behaves the way it does by examining demands at different scales and by playing What-If games. These analyses are not possible with demand forecast models built on historical samples, simply because, these forecast models and their level of accuracy are limited by their training data sets and can hardly demonstrate variations that are not present in the historical data sets.

Enabling Scalable Hybrid Systems: Architectures for Exploiting Large-Area Electronics in Applications

By enabling diverse and large-scale transducers, large-area electronics raises the potential for electronic systems to interact much more extensively with the physical world than is possible today. This can substantially expand the scope of applications, both in number and in value. But first, translation into applications requires a base of system functions (instrumentation, computation, power management, communication). These cannot be realized on the desired scale by large-area electronics alone. It is necessary to combine large-area electronics with high-performance, high-efficiency technologies, such as crystalline silicon CMOS, within hybrid systems . Scalable hybrid systems require rethinking the subsystem architectures from the start by considering how the technologies should be interfaced, on both a functional and physical level. To explore platform architectures along with the supporting circuits and devices, we consider as an application driver, a self-powered sheet for high-resolution structural health monitoring (of bridges and buildings). Top-down evaluation of design alternatives within the hybrid design space and pursuit of template architectures exposes circuit functions and device optimizations traditionally overlooked by bottom-up approaches alone.

Evaluation of Design Alternatives’ Environmental Impact by Integrating Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Evidential Reasoning Approach

Today “ecodesign” is a necessary consideration in the product development process. With increasing general awareness of the need for environmental production and more stringent regulatory requirements, manufacturers have to try to minimize their environmental impact. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a generally accepted quantitative approach that can be applied to support environmental impact evaluations of a product. However, despite the time-consuming and resource-consuming attributes of the LCA, it has difficulty to deal with uncertain information. Therefore, LCA is yet to be a practical approach for environmental impact evaluation, particularly, during new product development (NPD). This paper proposes an approach to evaluate the environmental performance of design alternatives during NPD. The use of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches with LCA methodology for the evaluation of design alternatives’ environmental performance during NPD processes is first discussed. The proposed approach integrates analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy set theory (FST) with evidential reasoning (ER) in the evaluation of environmental performance to prioritize different design options. A case study is described to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

Automatic evaluation of design alternatives with quantitative argumentation

This paper presents a novel argumentation framework to support Issue-Based Information System style debates on design alternatives, by providing an automatic quantitative evaluation of the positions put forward. It also identifies several formal prop

Systems Engineering Resiliency: Guiding Tradespace Exploration within an Engineered Resilient Systems Context

Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) is a Department of Defense (DoD) program focusing on the effective and efficient design and development of complex engineered systems across their lifecycle. An important area of focus is the evaluation of early-stage design alternatives in terms of their modeled operational performance and characteristics. This work strives to lay the initial foundations for systems engineering the analysis of resiliency in this context through the development of modular, composable, and scalable analytical constructs and processes. The analytical methods are derived from existing ontological bases, and seek to promote consistency and comparability from one analysis to the next. Specifically, analytical methods in this work focus on evaluating ‘Robustness of fielded system capabilities and capacity with respect to operational requirements’ and ‘Flexibility of a designed system to engineering change’. The development philosophy strives to enable design and development of resiliency analyses that are transparent, intuitive, rational, and quantifiably traceable.

Evaluation of Design Alternatives' Environmental Performance Using AHP and ER Approaches

This paper proposes an approach to evaluate the environmental performance of design alternatives during new product development (NPD) processes. The use of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches with life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology to evaluate design alternatives' environmental performance during NPD processes is first dis- cussed. The proposed approach integrates an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with evidential reasoning (ER) in the environ- mental performances evaluation and prioritization of different design options. A case study is described to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

Design Evaluation Method for Design Engineer in Manufacturing Industries Using Integrated Rough-Grey Analysis Approach

In order to remain competitive in today’s technologically driven world, the faster and more efficient development of innovative products has become the focus for manufacturing companies. In tandem with this, design evaluation plays a critical role in the early phases of product development, because it has significant impact on the downstream development processes as well as on the success of the product being developed. Owing to the pressure of primary factors, such as customer expectations, technical specifications and cost and time constraints, designers have to adopt various techniques for evaluating design alternatives in order to make the right decisions as early as possible. In this work, a new methodology for design evaluation has been developed. The preliminary stage quantifies all the criteria from different viewpoints through the process of scale of “Weighting criteria”. The next stage uses a modified Rough-Grey Analysis to obtain the alternatives weighting or ranking of the alternatives. This method will enable designers to make better-informed decisions before finalising their choice. Case example from industry is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology. The result of the example shows that this new method provides an alternative to existing methods of design evaluation.