Multidisciplinary Engineering Research Articles

J102011 複合領域システムの最適設計における設計者の思考過程の分析とその記述的管理法(〔J102-01〕1DCAEを活用した設計と教育)

Design of a complicated system requires multi-disciplinary engineering analysis for the verification of its physical behavior. Although a CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) system can support its calculation and visualization of the results, it is important to make appropriate models considering critical phenomena, modeling conditions, the level of details and so on. These processes of engineering analysis modeling remain with the realm of tacit knowledge of engineers. This paper analyses an engineer's thinking process in design of a heavy manufacturing system, and proposes descriptive management method in order to explicitly describe knowledge of engineering analysis modeling and its operation process in multi-disciplinary system design. This method employs EAMM (Engineering Analysis Modeling Matrix) using IDEFO (Integrated Definition for Function Modeling) as a knowledge representation framework of modeling of each system element. IBIS model is employed to represent bases of input etc of modeling of system. The ability of the method is verified with a design example of desiccant air conditioning system.

International Partnership Helping to Bring Appropriate Biofuel Technology to Rural Cameroon

In May 2012, a group of chemical and mechanical engineering students from the newly established [University Name] Appropriate Technology and Sustainability [Identifying Acronym] undergraduate research group embarked on a 10 day visit to Bangang Village, Cameroon in West Africa to implement a multidisciplinary engineering service-based project to develop appropriate, sustainable biodiesel and biochar technology for use by local villagers. The participating students had worked on this design project both as part of their capstone design course in both Chemical and Mechanical Engineering and as part of a special elective that included an embedded study abroad component. Poverty and rapid population growth have led to the accelerated destruction of natural resources throughout the developing world, particularly West Africa. The purpose of this project was not only to introduce students to the concepts of sustainability, service based learning and appropriate technology, but to get them beyond the textbooks and laboratories and solve real problems that impact real people around the world.

A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of a Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Course

BACKGROUND Capstone design courses seek to prepare engineering students for industry by challenging student teams to solve real-world problems. To improve this preparation, university programs have recently focused on creating multidisciplinary teams. However, there is limited quantitative evidence showing that multidisciplinary student engineering teams develop higher quality projects or are better prepared for the work force.

Measuring Service Quality of a Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Course

This article demonstrates the use of SERVQUAL to measure the service quality of an engineering design course for undergraduates. With about five hundred students in every semester and the involvement of a large number of lecturers, effective administration of the course is crucial. SERVQUAL has been employed to measure the service quality provided to the students based on their level of satisfaction. The study is done empirically by analysing the difference between expectations and perceptions of the students, vis-̂-vis service quality. The outcome of the analysis would enable identification of future improvement in the aspect of administration of the course.

Architecting Framework for Managing Stakeholders in Construction Projects

Recently there has been major thrust and focus in construction sector across all formats of construction. Managing construction projects while integrating multidisciplinary engineering in all forms needs systematic approach, to and by stakeholders. Devising systemic plans and protocols to achieve products at desired levels is the need. Systemic thinking is important in every discipline – agriculture and airships, biology and business, culture and climate, design and development, economics and engineering, finance and fashion, mathematics and manufacturing, politics and production, technology and tactics. A systemic approach is required to find options for resolutions for complex problems. Stakeholder characteristics triad – Interested, Involved and Influence – needs impartial analysis by project team. With the outcome of this analysis included in a SMART strategy and plan, coupled with right tools for desired outputs, always defines the effectiveness of any management strategy. Sometimes, stakeholder Management goes beyond strategy and plan. It builds relationships in project. Relationship Management is 'the' hinge for success and failure of a project. Communication being an engagement model in a project, a systemic tool needs to be collaborative, robust, sustainable, responsive, and compact to facilitate relationship management in projects. Communication methods need to be adaptive to personalities, cultures and egos. The tool needs to be sustainable for entire life cycle of any project. In this paper we have identify inputs, tools and outputs for various process in communication and have provided an empirical framework as a tool for an individual or a team or project members to device a communication plan while managing stakeholders.

Student-Directed Learning Opportunities for the Development of Life-Long Learning Skills

One of the skills we aim to develop in our students is the ability to work and function as life-long learners. This paper describes two curricular initiatives designed to foster life-long learning skills through student-driven learning in a multidisciplinary engineering program. Student-directed initiatives can help build critical thinking and information literacy skills, which are essential in the information and data-rich landscape that engineers work within. The challenges and benefits in developing and facilitating these initiatives, which run counter to the more traditional pedagogical framework in higher education, are discussed.

Adapting Existing Assessment Tools For Use in Assessing Engineering Graduate Attributes

Recently, changes to the Canadian Engineering Accreditation requirements, following the example set by ABET, have called for the measurement of 12 graduate attributes in the engineering curriculum. Some attributes, such as “Knowledge Base,” lend themselves to forms of quantitative measurement; others, such as “Investigation” and “Communication” are inherently difficult to measure quantitatively and comprehensively. To assess these attributes authentically within our current curriculum, methods for adapting existing tools – that both satisfy the objectives of the actual course and the needs of graduate attributes assessment – must be found. This paper describes the process and challenges involved in adapting existing tools for assessment to measure such graduate attributes, specifically in a large senior research thesis course in a multidisciplinary engineering program. These challenges include balancing both the needs of multiple parties involved in the assessment, maintaining rubric usability, reliability and validity, as well as appropriately matching rubric elements to attributes. Despite these tensions, the results provided by this process provide insight about rubric design, assessment strategies and the students’ strengths and weaknesses within the graduate attributes, providing valuable information to feed back into the graduate attribute and continual curriculum improvement processes.

BPS, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources for buildings greening and zero energy cities planning: Harmony and ethics of sustainability

This paper reviews crucial role of building performance simulation (BPS) – dynamic analysis of the inextricable linkage of building's energy demand for HVAC and other building's technical systems sustainable energy supply and renewable energy sources (RES) availability to reach building's zero energy status. Reviewed are BPS advances in buildings energy efficiency optimization, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources integrated implementation, as well as hybridization and mixed distributed energy generation, co- and tri-generation for building's greening and sustainable neighborhoods, settlements, as well as “high performance” Zero Energy Cities Planning. As an introduction, outlined is the intrinsic harmony of the traditional village houses balanced use of renewable materials and energy sources and presented are feasibility study results on the sustainable Zero Energy ECO Settlement at the Mediterranean Sea proceeded by the description of the site's sustainability's constrains assessment. Architectural design and building's dynamic behavior and energy efficiency optimization resulting in minimization of thermal and lighting loads, precede to the multidisciplinary engineering investigation and preliminary design of sustainable Zero Energy Buildings confirming feasibility of settlement's sustainable energy and water supply by the reliable implementation of solar PV and wind technologies, including PV powered sea water desalination. Further, interwoven with presentation of a few case studies, paper outlines advances in BPS and Co-simulation. Reviewed are optimization of mixed, natural and mechanical ventilation via CFD integrated with architectural modeling; BPS and Co-simulation approach to the “total building performance optimization” encompassing multifunctional facades, day-lighting, IE&AQ and HVAC systems operation offering an enormous potential for energy saving by residential/municipal RES integrated renovation. Stressed has been that it is impossible to reach sustainability without harmonious interdisciplinary interacting, without balance between materiality and spirituality, science and art, technology development and cultural and other human values improvement, without ethics of sustainability.

Designing A Floating Island: Soul Flora in Korea

The floating island named “Soul Flora,” has been built on the Han River at the heart of Seoul in Korea to revitalize riverside recreation areas. Its construction started in March 2009 with the governmental fund of KRW 96,4 billion (USD 84 million) and was completed in 2011. It consists of three large, man-made floating islets over a total area of 9995 m2. The first islet “Vista” is the largest of the three and can accommodate 692 seats in a multipurpose hall for plays, concerts, festivals, and other cultural performances. The second islet “Viva” serves as a place for entertainment such as performances, and the third islet “Terra”, which is the smallest, is the base for water sports and leisure activities. The geometry of the framed steel structures of the islets symbolizes growth from a seed to a flower in full bloom. This framed structural system was adopted to provide structural resistance against gravitational and lateral loadings without any additional bracing system. Use of glass curtain walls and aluminum panels enhances transparency and clarity of the structural forms. Each island is designed to automatically control the tightness of the chains. When a flood raises the water level to more than 16 m, the metal chains of the floating islands will automatically tighten to keep the islands in their original locations. This floating island, which is blooming as an artistic sculpture using multidisciplinary engineering technology, was planned to be an outstanding landmark of Seoul, Korea.

Measures against Problems with Adequateness of Graduation Research for Multi-disciplinary Engineering and Engineering Design Education

Measures against Problems with Adequateness of Graduation Research for Multi-disciplinary Engineering and Engineering Design Education

Relating Grades of Maths and Science Courses with Students' Performance in a Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Program – A Gender Inclusive Case Study

Statistical analysis was used to evaluate relationships between students' overall and course performances in a multi-disciplinary undergraduate engineering program. 319 students admitted during 1999–2009 were considered. 6 courses in mathematics, 4 in physical-sciences and 3 in life-sciences were analyzed.The difference between program and course performances was less than ±0.5 grade point average for 75%, 63% and 58% students, respectively, in mathematics, physical-sciences and life-sciences. Respective coefficients of correlation were 0.85, 0.76 and 0.79. The women sub-group achieved closer relationships.The analysis suggests that performance in mathematics courses could indicate the trend toward overall performance in the engineering program.

Semantic Integration of Software and Systems Engineering Environments

Software-intensive systems in business information technology (IT) and industrial automation have become increasingly complex due to the need for more flexible system reconfiguration and business and engineering processes. Systems and software-engineering projects depend on the cooperation of experts from heterogeneous engineering domains using tools that were not designed to cooperate seamlessly. Current semantic-engineering-environment integration is often ad hoc and fragile, thereby making the evolution of tools and the reuse of integration solutions across projects unnecessarily inefficient and risky. This paper describes the engineering-knowledge-base (EKB) framework for engineering-environment integration in multidisciplinary engineering projects. The EKB stores explicit engineering knowledge to support access to and management of engineering models across tools and disciplines by providing 1) data integration based on mappings between local and domain-level engineering concepts; 2) transformations between local engineering concepts; and 3) advanced applications built on these foundations, e.g., end-to-end analyses. As a result, experts from different organizations may use their well-known tools and data models and can access data from other tools in their syntax. The research results have been evaluated in the industrial-application domain of software-intensive production-automation systems. The evaluation results indicate an effort-reduction for reuse in new engineering projects and finding defects earlier in the engineering process.

Gardens by the Bay: Ecologically Reflective Design

AbstractMeredith Davey of Atelier Ten describes how as part of a design team led by Grant Associates with architects Wilkinson Eyre, multidisciplinary engineers Atelier Ten have developed a scheme for the Gardens by the Bay, Bay South in Singapore based on first principles. Holistically integrated solutions have been sought to the central and demanding brief to create artificial interior environments that will enable Mediterranean and mountain plants to grow in the tropical urban heat of downtown Singapore. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Quality requirements engineering for systems and software architecting: methods, approaches, and tools

Requirements engineering and software architecture are quite mature software engineering sub-disciplines, which often seem to be disconnected for many reasons and it is difficult to perceive the impact of functional and non-functional requirements on architecture and to establish appropriate trace links for traceability purposes. In other cases, the estimation of how non-functional requirements, as the quality properties a system should pose, is not perceived useful enough to produce high-quality software. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of quality requirements for architecting and building complex software systems that in many cases require multidisciplinary engineering techniques, which increases the complexity of the software development process.

Panel: Integrating Model‐Based Systems Engineering into a Multidisciplinary Engineering Environment

Panel: Integrating Model‐Based Systems Engineering into a Multidisciplinary Engineering Environment

Teaching water desalination through active learning

Active learning refers to the direct involvement of students in the learning process rather than being passive receptors of materials. This paper evaluates the implementation of active learning in teaching seawater desalination as an elective course in chemical engineering curriculum. Desalination is a multi-disciplinary engineering science that encompasses elements of water chemistry, material science, transport phenomena, thermodynamics, engineering design, and corrosion. Water desalination is an important course in most chemical and mechanical engineering curricula, where the design and analysis of different water desalination processes are addressed. The current teaching method, however, relies heavily on classical lecture-presentation of the course materials, without any direct involvement of the students. A simple approach that utilizes Excel and Ez-Solve in designing and analyzing desalination processes has been developed. Active learning is the central part of this course development, where students are heavily involved in class activities and can directly assess the effect of input variables on the design parameters, allowing them to carry out “ What If” or parameter sensitivity analysis.

CAPSTONE DESIGN IN ENGINEERING AND SOCIETY AT MCMASTER UNIVERSITY

Engineering and Society is a five-year program at McMaster University which is available to all departments within the Faculty of Engineering. A new core course, offered for the first time in the Winter 2009 semester, was taken by Society students in their final year. This course is a capstone design course titled “Design for Society”. The course culminated in a group design project wherein the students were given an open-ended problem and were asked to provide a conceptual solution. The problem involved the territorial government of Nunavut, Canada, wanting to give a boost to its tourist trade while showcasing the culture, history and heritage of their people. This case study paper provides an overview of the challenges and successes of delivering this course and will be of interest to those individuals who are contemplating the development and launch of a multidisciplinary engineering design course offering.

A development methodology for variant-rich automotive software architectures

Ever accelerating product cycles together with multi-discipline engineering processes are typical for safety-critical automotive embedded systems development. This demands for both efficient and effective development and reuse strategies. A development process following the V-model incorporating model-driven prototyping and development, safety engineering, and verification (unit testing, integration testing, cosimulation, etc.) is commonly found. Product line engineering enables fast and efficient product configuration through systematic reuse. The V-model has been extended by an integrated product line engineering environment for automotive embedded systems. This ensures the consistent configuration across system architecture description (EAST-ADL2), model driven development (Matlab/Simulink), software component deployment on an ECU network (AUTOSAR-based), Simulink-based software unit testing, Simulink-based software integration testing, and co-simulation model variants. Using the automotive architecture description language EAST-ADL2 enables the integration of safety engineering aspects.

Execution and evaluation of complex industrial automation and control projects using the systems engineering approach

AbstractThis paper presents the results of our implementation and evaluation studies of industrial automation and control projects in the process industries using the systems engineering approach. Industrial Automation and Control (IAC) projects are complex technical projects including state‐of‐the‐art large bill of materials, multidisciplinary engineering resources, and a considerable amount of capital. The factors that are critical to the successful implementation of IAC projects are identified and discussed based on the literature and the experience gained in various large‐ and medium‐size industrial applications. The hierarchical structure of modern IAC systems and milestones of project implementation are also presented. A case study in the steel making processes is introduced to demonstrate the substantial benefits of incorporating systems engineering approaches into the successful implementation of IAC projects. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 14: 193–207, 2011

RISK ASSESSMENT IN MULTI-DISCIPLINARY (SOFTWARE+) ENGINEERING PROJECTS

Software systems in safety-critical industrial automation systems, such as power plants and steel mills, become increasingly large, complex, and distributed. For assessing risks, like low product quality and project cost and duration overruns, to trustworthy services provided by software as part of automation systems there are established risk analysis approaches based on data collection from project participants and data models. However, in multi-disciplinary engineering projects there are often semantic gaps between the software tools and data models of the participating engineering disciplines, e.g., mechanic, electrical, and software engineering. In this paper we discuss current limitations to risk assessment in (software+) engineering projects and introduce the SEMRISK approach for risk assessment in projects with semantically heterogeneous software tools and data models. The SEMRISK approach provides the knowledge engineering foundation to allow an end-to-end view for service-relevant data elements such as signals, by providing a project domain ontology and mappings to the tool data models of the involved engineering disciplines. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach based on a real-world industrial use case from the safety-critical power plant domain. Major results are that the approach was effective and considerably more efficient than the current approach at the industry partner.