systems engineering advancement research initiative

Systems Engineering Advancement

Research Initiative

RESEARCH BULLETIN AUGUST 2008 Vol. 3, Issue 2

About SEAri

The Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri) brings together a set of sponsored research projects and a consortium of systems engineering leaders from industry, government, and academia. SEAri is uniquely positioned within the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a new kind of interdisciplinary academic unit that spans most departments within the School of Engineering, as well as the School of Science, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Sloan School of Management. This setting offers a robust research and learning environment for advancing systems engineering to meet the contemporary challenges of complex socio-technical systems. SEAri

has strategic relationships with several educational and research programs at MIT,

including the System Design & Management Program (SDM) and Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI) Research Program at MIT. Find out more at http://seari.mit.edu/

MIT ESDMIT ESD

Upcoming SEAri Research Summit SEAri’s annual research summit will take place on Tuesday, 21 October 2008. The summit is designed to showcase the group’s ongoing research related to advancing theories, methods, and effective practice of systems engineering. The event brings research sponsors and invited experts together with SEAri group researchers, students, and affiliated faculty in order to validate the relevance and potential impact of the ongoing projects in the research portfolio. The current research portfolio includes projects in the areas of: socio-technical decision making, designing for value robustness, systems engineering economics, and systems engineering in the enterprise. Additionally, research outcomes are synthesized and formulated as strategic guidance in the form of guidebooks, process documents, and policy recommendations. The SEAri research group interacts with its sponsors on a regular basis as research projects progress, but the summit provides added value to all attendees, encouraging a richer dialogue and cross-project insights. Last year’s attendees found the summit to be informative, and also noted the value of having a research oriented dialogue with peers from other sponsoring organizations. In addition to formal briefings on the research, a research poster session will be held to facilitate interactive discussions. This year, an optional roundtable on the evening before the event will provide for deeper discussions on a selected topic. The summit is a key event for providing SEAri with insight into making adjustments to the research program in order to have real impact in the systems community. In turn, sponsors and interested organizations can influence research directions, as well as identify what research projects show potential benefit. For further information on the summit, visit http://seari.mit.edu or contact the leadership team at [email protected].

A Message from the Leadership Team

SEAri is dedicated to both performing cutting edge research and to enabling research-based education. The summer of 2008 seems to offer great evidence that the group is making strides in both these areas. We continue to evolve our research in tradespace exploration and value robustness, and as evidence of our impact on the systems community, we were pleased to receive both of the best paper awards at this year’s INCOSE conference, following a win of the best paper of the IEEE Systems Conference. The recognition for our work by the systems community is deeply meaningful to us, as we feel it validates that our research is somewhat unique and of value to tomorrow’s engineering practice. While the papers are important knowledge assets in themselves, the real value lies in accomplishing the underlying research required to produce such papers. Each of our papers represents an intellectual contribution that is most typically a collaborative outcome of researchers discovering and learning together, while engaging with the community of practice. This semester we added two new areas of research-based education in the group, expanding our graduate student education activities to both professionals and undergraduates. We taught our first research-based course for professionals in an MIT Professional Institute class held in June. The course, Value Driven Tradespace Exploration for Systems Design, was

Table of Contents Message from the Leadership Team................. 1-2 Research Spotlight 1 ......................................... 3 Research Spotlight 2 ......................................... 5 SEAri News........................................................ 7 Upcoming Events............................................... 8

SEAri Research Bulletin Volume 3, Issue 2 August 2008 http://seari.mit.edu © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology of 8

attended by professionals from industry, government and academia, representing several countries. One participant described the value of the class as “understanding that there are advanced techniques and methodologies available for highly complex trade study analyses.” For the SEAri instructor team, the course permits feedback from practitioners to inform future research, shaping our technology transfer strategy, and validating the methodological approaches. Our summer was a busy one, with a peak effort on a large innovation research project funded by a US government agency to evolve our dynamic tradespace exploration methods. In support of this project, we augmented our research team with top undergraduate students. Working as part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), Sophomores Zaira Garate and Tim McKinley and Juniors Dennis Odhiambo and David Stein worked throughout the summer, with Senior Alex Burg also participating. The UROP students came from a diversity of academic backgrounds, including Aerospace Engineering, Physics, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. All noted that they got a first-hand experience with graduate-level research and professional work, something they believed will help them make educated decisions for the future, and new perspectives on career plans. One discovered the cross-cutting nature of SE provides a way to combine his interests in political science and aerospace engineering. The enriched research-based educational experience enables benefits to students well beyond what the classroom experience can provide. Our undergraduate students noted that they particularly appreciated the way the project “required them to immerse themselves deep in the material” and “to defend their findings in front of the group during daily meetings”, noting that this process really pushed them to get a deep understanding of the field. They enjoyed feeling like active members of the team and despite their lack of previous exposure to systems engineering, they were able to contribute to many integral aspects of the project, including both concepts and actual development of the technical models. One student noted that MIT classroom problem sets will now seem “a walk in the park” compared to the rolling deadlines and doing research on complex topics. This research-based experience allowed these young students to see how collaboration of multiple disciplines and the detail that goes into systems engineering drives the way researchers approach projects, and gave them a genuine appreciation for the systems field. One student summarized the experiential learning in tradespace exploration, remarking “…to see weeks of work appear on a screen as a blob of data points might

seem disheartening at first, but as we meticulously revised code, the original blob from halfway through the summer gradually molded itself into a new concept—the multi-attribute tradespace.” The magnitude of the project, the vast combined knowledge base of the SEAri team, and the fact that the project involved space satellites were but a few things the students came to appreciate. Consensus was that the research experience was “the best way to conclude this school year by gaining a superb insight into how systems of systems work.” The insights and reactions of the students underscore how important hands-on research experience is at all levels of academic study. While sponsors often focus on

the value of research as desired methodological, technological or procedural outcomes, experiences this summer remind us that research is an investment in developing tomorrow’s engineers and sparking new ideas in today’s experienced workforce. Donna H. Rhodes, Ph.D.

SEAri Community Leadership Dr. Donna Rhodes, Director Dr. Adam Ross, V-STARS lead Dr. Ricardo Valerdi, R-STARS lead Internal Advisory Board Professor Daniel Hastings, Aero/Astro, ESD Professor Debbie Nightingale, Aero/Astro, ESD Mr. Pat Hale, SDM Fellows Program Director Affiliated Faculty Professor Missy Cummings, Aero/Astro Professor Richard de Neufville, Civil E., ESD Professor Olivier de Weck, Aero/Astro, ESD Professor Daniel Frey, Mech E., ESD Professor Daniel Hastings, Aero/Astro, ESD Professor Christopher Magee, Mech E., ESD Professor Debbie Nightingale, Aero/Astro, ESD Professor Daniel Roos, Civil E., ESD Professor Warren Seering, Mech. E., ESD Professor Joseph Sussman, Civil E., ESD Professor Annalisa Weigel, Aero/Astro, ESD SEAri and Affiliated Graduate Research Assistants David Broniatowski Deb Chattopadhyay Greg Lack Caroline Lamb Kevin Liu Tsoline Mikaelian Julia Nickel Matthew Richards Christopher Roberts Nirav Shah Lauren Viscito Sponsored Research Partners Singapore DSTA US Air Force NSF/IGERT POET MIT-Portugal Program LAI US Government Agency


Metrics for Incorporating Survivability

in Tradespace Studies

Research by Matthew Richards, Ph.D. Student in Engineering Systems

Survivability is the ability of a system to minimize the impact of a finite-duration disturbance on value delivery [1]. Although survivability is an emergent system property that arises from interactions between systems and their environments, conventional approaches to survivability engineering are often reductionist in nature (i.e., focused only on selected properties of subsystems or modules in isolation). As a result, current methods neither accommodate path dependencies nor facilitate stakeholder communication for trading among system lifecycle cost, performance, and survivability [2]. To address these limitations, a preliminary set of metrics is being developed for the evaluation of survivability in tradespace studies during conceptual design. The metrics are based on a characterization of survivability as the ability of a system to meet required levels of value delivery during nominal and perturbed environmental conditions. To illustrate and test the proposed metrics, the survivability of a low-Earth orbit (LEO) “space tug” satellite to orbital debris was recently evaluated for systems incorporating various combinations of passive bumper shielding, active collision avoidance, and on-orbit servicing [3]. Three desirable characteristics for evaluating survivability are: (1) value-based, to allow comparisons across technically-diverse system concepts, (2) dynamic, to allow assessment (and enhancement) of survivability across the lifecycle of a disturbance, and (3) continuous (rather than a discrete, binary characterization), to enable distinction between systems that gracefully degrade and those that fail immediately following a disturbance. Guided by these criteria, this article introduces two metrics for the assessment of survivability in tradespace studies during conceptual design: time-weighted average utility loss and threshold availability. The development of metrics with construct validity for the survivability definition [1] requires evaluating a system’s ability both to minimize utility losses and to meet critical value thresholds before, during, and after disturbances. Given a characterization of a system’s utility delivery over time using a multi-attribute utility function, U(t), the time-weighted average utility loss may be defined:

∫⋅−= dttUT

UU

dl

oL )(1

Time-weighted average utility loss may be used to assess the difference between the beginning-of-life, design utility, Uo, and the time-weighted average utility achieved by a system across operational environments during its design life, Tdl. However, while this metric enables continuous evaluations to be made across systems regarding ability to minimize degradation, it does not internalize the ability to meet critical value thresholds. Threshold availability, AT, evaluates the ability of a system to meet critical value thresholds. AT is defined as the ratio of mean time above thresholds MTAT to the total design life:

dl

T

T

MTATA =

Having introduced two new metrics for evaluating survivability, results from their deployment in a satellite tradespace study are now presented. As discussed in depth in Ref. 3, the modeling approach for testing the survivability metrics consists of four general phases: (1) static Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE), (2) Epoch-Era Analysis, (3) stochastic simulation of space tug operation, and (4) Monte Carlo analysis. First, a legacy MATE study on space tug vehicles is extended in which decision maker preferences (i.e., attributes) are quantified and aggregated using multi-attribute utility theory, and then, candidate satellite designs are assessed in terms of cost and utility using parametric computer models and simulations. Second, Epoch-Era Analysis is performed in which satellite lifetimes (i.e., Eras) are modeled as sets of discrete time periods with fixed contexts and needs (i.e., Epochs). Applying techniques from network analysis, static tradespaces from MATE are linked over time wherein nodes represent satellite configurations and arcs represent satellite state transitions. Potential system Eras for the candidate space tug designs are constructed by stringing together both baseline (i.e., ambient environment) and disturbance Epochs (i.e., debris conjunction events). Third, a stochastic simulation of space tug operations is performed in which debris impacts are modeled as forced transitions of space tugs in the tradespace to lower utility designs (or end-of-life states). Each run of the simulation produces a utility trajectory (i.e., a plot of multi-attribute utility over time) for a candidate space tug in the tradespace. Fourth, a Monte Carlo analysis is performed across the stochastic,

Research Spotlight 1


path-dependent utility trajectories, and the survivability metrics are applied.

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The figure above presents a sample utility trajectory output from the model, illustrating U(t) for one candidate design alternative over one possible 10-year operational life. Following normal degradation during the first 18 months of operation, two non-catastrophic debris impacts occur in quick succession during the latter part of the second year. Due to a temporary reduction in stakeholder expectations following the disturbance, U(t) does not pass below the critical value threshold. The first debris impact prompts a request for servicing that is successfully filled during the second year. A similar sequence of events occurs between the third and fifth years. In both cases, large quantities of utility are lost while critical value thresholds are met. As survivability is a stochastic, path-dependent property, the outcome of any particular run for a given design alternative is not representative or meaningful from a decision making perspective. Rather, each utility trajectory constitutes one data sample from a continuous distribution of potential system lifecycles. Therefore, the survivability metrics are applied as aggregate measures for each set of space tug utility trajectories. To address the need for trading lifecycle cost, performance, and survivability of design alternatives, a survivability “tear” tradespace representation was developed (see figure). The purpose of the tear tradespace is to integrate deterministic cost and design utility data with the distributions of time-weighted average utility and threshold availability. Preserving the cost and design utility axes of traditional tradespaces, the new survivability metrics are integrated using color (threshold availability–5

th percentile) and a line drawn

sized by the median time-weighted utility loss. Rather than only highlighting the selection of designs dominant in terms of cost and utility at beginning-of-life,

the tear tradespace identifies “interior” designs that may offer superior survivability performance with only small compromises in cost and design utility. Both time-weighted average utility loss and threshold availability proved to be discriminating metrics for navigating tradespaces of thousands of design alternatives.

Survivability “Tear” Tradespace (Filtered) References [1] Richards, M., Hastings, D., Rhodes, D., and Weigel, A., “Defining Survivability for Engineering Systems,” 5

th

Conference on Systems Engineering Research, Hoboken, NJ, March 2007.

[2] Richards, M., Hastings, D., Rhodes, D., and Weigel, A., “Systems Architecting for Survivability: Limitations of Existing Methods for Aerospace Systems,” 6

th

Conference on Systems Engineering Research, Los Angeles, CA, April 2008.

[3] Richards, M., Ross, A., Shah, N., and Hastings, D., “Metrics for Evaluating Survivability in Dynamic Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration,” AIAA Space 2008, San Diego, CA, September 2008.

Matthew Richards Matthew Richards is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT in ESD. His current research is focused on design for survivability and dynamic tradespace exploration. Matt has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. From MIT, Matt has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace

Engineering (2004, 2006) and an M.S. degree in Technology and Policy (2006).

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Pareto Surface of Cost, Utility, and Utility Loss (n=279)

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Application of Multi-Attribute

Tradespace Exploration to the

Architecting and Design of a

Transportation Engineering System

Research by Julia Nickel, S.M. Student in Engineering Systems

Transportation systems are a vital part of our infrastructure. Movement of people and goods via air, road, rail or waterway enable virtually every economic activity. Transportation systems exhibit a particularly high level of interaction with their surrounding environment: On the one hand, land-use patterns, geography and the economic situation of a region determine the need for and feasibility of transportation facilities. On the other hand, the availability of transportation facilities has a long-lasting impact on land-use, the urban landscape, and the environmental and economic situation of a region. As much as transportation systems are vital, so too do they leave their negative footprints on a region: noise, pollution, ecological degradation, and safety risks are some of the inconveniences, which, to varying degrees, people living in the vicinity of transportation activity must bear. Due to the long lifecycles of civil structures- possibly 50 years or longer- transportation planning has to assume a long-term perspective on positive and negative impacts of a system, bearing in mind the changing environment in which the system is going to operate. Transportation systems deliver a complex set of costs and benefits to different groups of stakeholders over long periods of time and under conditions of high uncertainty. Like every complex engineering system, their design requires the use of sophisticated decision and design methods. Transportation design methods have been improved and have become increasingly comprehensive, as more and more interactions of a given system with its environment have been discovered. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as a method for evaluating different designs remains a core tool for transportation system design selection. CBA seeks to enumerate all possible costs and benefits of a particular design, assigns them monetary equivalents, discounts future values to a Net Present Value, and adds them to a single number. The differences in scores among alternatives allow a ranking of alternatives and a reduction of feasible designs to those that would constitute Pareto improvements (net benefits> net costs). CBA is the preferred evaluation method for many practitioners as well as Government Authorities such as

the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Highway Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

1,7 The method allows a certain

transparency that helps justify political decisions and makes possible the comparison of different designs on a common scale., There are a number of flaws inherent in this method, however, for example, introduction of critical value assumptions through discounting of non-monetary goods, interpersonal comparisons of stakeholder utility, and aggregating of certain and uncertain costs on a common scale.

1, 3, 4

The current research seeks to improve the accounting of multiple cost types in tradespace studies for the conceptual design of transportation systems. Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE) is a decision and design method developed at MIT, which allows the mapping of an aggregate utility for a specific design to an individual user-valued attribute. In past applications in the aerospace domain, the overall utility derived from performance in the attributes was displayed against overall lifecycle cost in a tradespace. For applications in the transportation domain, the exploration of design utility (often describing benefits) against several undesirable attributes (multiple cost types), becomes increasingly important. Those attributes that the designer wants to keep at low levels, like development time or CO2 emissions, come at “expense.” An expense is akin to the idea of negative utility. The idea of Single-Attribute Expense Functions was proposed by Lt. Nathan Diller in the context of space system development expenses.

2 For applications to the

transportation domain, undesirable attributes that constitute “expenses” are include safety risks, noise, pollution, and other externalities.

The incorporation of undesirable attributes into tradespace studies is expected to address a number of shortcomings in classical CBA. First, the practice of discounting and aggregating of different types of costs and benefits introduces critical value assumptions. While appropriate for monetary costs, the discounting of the welfare of future

Research Spotlight 2


generations is criticized for devaluing future lives compared to lives today. The adding of costs and benefits hides information about which stakeholders have to bear them, introducing problematic interpersonal value comparisons. In MATE, we can preserve some of the information lost through aggregation and discounting by introducing more differentiations in the attributes, particularly in the less-researched area of “undesirable attributes”. Utility (or expense) in MATE is elicited separately for different stakeholders. The rationale behind benefit- cost aggregation is that beneficiaries can compensate losers if their benefits supersede the cost incurred to others. However, the cost dimensions below are not easily interchangeable and need to be kept separate in different applications.

Second, discounting does not adequately reflect the time context of costs and benefits. Some projects are time-critical, meaning that the value derived from a project depends critically on the point in time when it is put online. An example is the airport express that is currently being planned for the City of Chicago. The value delivered by this project depends largely upon its completion in time for the Summer Olympics in 2016, should Chicago be selected as the host city. For time-critical missions, attributes can be distinguished according to their occurrence in time, such as: travel time to/from airport by 2016, and travel time after 2016. Third, uncertainty about future developments makes assumptions about costs and benefits vulnerable to forecasting errors and manipulation. An example for “different colors of money” is the cost structure of many transportation projects, which can be split up roughly in initial and recurring costs. Typically, initial investments are certain, whereas future costs are vulnerable to forecasting errors and manipulation. The idea of different cost types allows a separate exploration of costs that can be grouped in different categories of certainty, allowing a comparison of “apples to apples”. The question of how to account for uncertainty about future developments is the subject of ongoing related research in SEAri.

Transportation planning is largely cost-driven, rather than performance-driven. Due to the inheritance of large, legacy transportation systems, any new additions are small in comparison to what already exists. The focus of transportation design therefore increasingly shifts towards managing the existing. Transportation planning is often of remedial nature, in that planners try to mitigate ”harms” rather than generate benefits.

5 This

characteristic, together with the multi-dimensional footprint of civil structures and an often tight financial situation, explains an emphasis on minimizing costs and a lesser emphasis on maximizing desirable performance for transportation systems.. An important domain-comparative aspect to this research is in applying MATE, a method developed using aerospace applications, to the “new” domain of transportation. It is expected that insights from this research can be extended to other domains. References

1. De Neufville, R.: Applied Systems Analysis, Engineering Planning and Technology Management, McGraw-Hill, New York,1990

2. Diller, N.P., Utilizing Multiple Attribute Tradespace Exploration with Concurrent Design for Creating Aerospace Systems Requirements, SM thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002

3. Gomez-Ibanez, J., Tye, W. B., and Winston, C.: Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 1999

4. Heinzerling, L. and Ackerman, F., “Pricing the Priceless: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Environmental Protection”, Georgetown U Law Center, 2002

5. Meyer, M. and Miller, E. Urban Transportation Planning, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001

6. Nickel, J., Ross, A.M., and Rhodes, D.H., “Cross-domain Comparison of Design Factors in System Design and Analysis of Space and Transportation Systems,” 6th Conference on Systems Engineering Research, Los Angeles, CA, 2008

7. Viscusi, W. K., Vernon J. M., and Harrington, J. E., Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, 3rd Edition, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000

Julia Nickel Julia Nickel is a second year Master’s student in Engineering Systems at MIT and a Research Assistant in SEAri. She is interested in the role of non-monetary costs in systems design and domain differences between space and transportation systems. Before coming to MIT, Julia studied in “Industrial Engineering and Management” at the University of

Karlsruhe in Germany. She has work experience with the Chicago Transit Authority, Franz Haniel & Cie. (a German logistics company), the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and Defense Research and Development Canada.


SEAri Wins Both Best Papers at

INCOSE 2008 Symposium

Two papers authored by members of ESD’s Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri) received the Best Paper awards at the 2008 Symposium of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), held June 16–20, in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Dr. Adam M. Ross, ESD Research Scientist, and Dr. Donna H. Rhodes, ESD Senior Lecturer and Principal Research Scientist, received one of the awards for their paper “Using Natural Value-Centric Time Scales for Conceptualizing System Timelines through Epoch-Era Analysis.” Matthew G. Richards, ESD doctoral candidate; Dr. Ross; Professor Daniel E. Hastings, professor of Engineering Systems and Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Dean for Undergraduate Education; and Dr. Rhodes were given the second award for “Two Empirical Tests of Design Principles for Survivable System Architecture.” The papers are both available and can be downloaded from the SEAri website.

Doctoral Student Network Workshop

Planned for CSER 2009

The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) will host the 3

rd SEANET doctoral student

workshop on 20 April 2009 in conjunction with the 2009 Conference on Systems Engineering Research in Loughborough UK. The workshop is designed to bring together doctoral students working in the systems field to share knowledge and experiences. SEANET continues to grow as the greater academic community learns about the network. The workshop format, similar to the previous ones, will include speakers and presentations, and also “birds-of-a-feather” discussion sessions on topics such as publication strategies, research methods, converging on a dissertation topic, and mixed methods research. The INCOSE Journal Systems Engineering Volume 10, Issue 4, includes an article on the SEANET entitled “Enabling Research Synergies through a Doctoral Research Network for Systems Engineering,” which provides background information and goals of the network. Interested students can contact workshop chairs Dr. Donna Rhodes and Dr. Ricardo Valerdi by sending an email to [email protected].

SEAri Welcomes New Student

SEAri is joined by a new graduate research assistant, Kevin Liu, starting in Fall 2008. Kevin recently graduated from the United States Naval Academy and is a 2

nd lieutenant in the US Marine Corps. He is working

on a master’s degree in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. He will be working on research on Systems Engineering Economics funded by the US Air Force Human Systems Integration Office.

Major Summer Project Engages

Undergraduates

This summer, as a part of a contract supporting the US Government, a large team of SEAri researchers and graduate students was joined by five MIT undergraduates as a part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). These undergraduates participated as members of a team developing system models for augmenting the dynamic tradespace exploration research through application to a complex space system. The research is anticipated to result in a method that will reveal system evolution strategies for maximizing system value delivery over time through changing contexts. The project is the first large scale case of applying Epoch-Era Analysis and the data will be analyzed for years to come. Results of the project will be published at AIAA Space 2009.

New Research with Air Force Human

Systems Integration Office

SEAri was recently awarded a research contract with the Air Force Human Systems Integration (HSI) Office. The project, Systems Engineering Economics for Human Systems Integration, will examine two areas. The first of these will be related to the allocation of overall systems engineering effort to human systems integration, and the second will be examining programmatic and technical measures for predictive HSI program outcomes. The research seeks to better enable program leadership to reason about their economic decisions in regard to HSI issues and investments. With the increasing complexity of systems, the human systems integration considerations are intensified. These include areas such as: manpower, personnel, human factors, system safety, personal survivability and health hazards. The research will leverage cost models and leading indicators which have been developed in the systems engineering community. The research team will engage with HSI experts to gain knowledge and insight into current practice to inform the research. The research team will leverage work ongoing in professional societies, and a workshop is planned to take place at the INCOSE International Workshop in February 2009. The research is led by Dr. Donna Rhodes and Dr. Ricardo Valerdi.

SEAri News


Academic Year 2008-2009 publishing

strategy set

In the academic year 2007-2008, SEAri published over 22 conference and journal papers, including five paper awards. In the coming year, the number of papers published is anticipated to grow to about 26 conference and journal papers, in addition to various working papers. Conference targets include the Geoint 2008 Symposium, 7

th Conference on Systems Engineering Research

(CSER), Responsive Space 7, 3rd

IEEE Systems Conference, 2009 INCOSE International Symposium, AIAA Space 2009, and a to-be-determined transportation conference. The targeted variety of venues is intended to disseminate the research across domains and practitioner and academic communities.

MIT SDM Annual Conference

Systems thinkers from around the globe will convene at MIT on October 23-24, 2008 to hear MIT faculty and industry leaders discuss how to apply a systems approach to large-scale, complex projects. The theme of this year's conference, which is sponsored annually by MIT's System Design and Management Program, is "Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges." Topics to be covered include sustainability and the environment, product design, entrepreneurship and software. Speakers include MIT experts and senior executives from Microsoft, Agilent, Herman Miller, IDEO, eClinicalWorks, HubSpot and Capgemini. Information on the MIT SDM program can be found at http://sdm.mit.edu.

PSM SE Leading Indicators Workshop

As part of the 12th Annual Practical Software and Systems Measurement Users’ Group Conference, a

workshop was held 15 July in Groton, CT to further the work on this project. Initiated by the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI), this four year effort has been a collaboration of LAI, INCOSE, PSM, and SEAri. The goal of this workshop was to document additional information needs/issues and indicators that are not currently addressed by the SE leading indicators in the Version 1.0 guide. The results will be combined with the results from the previous workshop and prioritized to establish the scope of work for the upcoming revision to the guide. In addition, additional opportunities to use these indicators were identified. The workshop was led by Garry Roedler, INCOSE/Lockheed Martin; Donna Rhodes, MIT; and Cheryl Jones, PSM. A Version 2.0 Guide is planned for June 2009.

SEAri Moving to New Space in 2009

SEAri will be relocating to new office and laboratory space in January 2009. The new space will be nearby the current offices in the Kendall Square area of campus. The new space will provide additional offices and larger collaboration area for the growing research group. Plans are also underway to set up a new laboratory for advanced research in the area of tradespace exploration, visualization, and communication. Details on the new location will be posted soon on the SEAri website.

Voice of the Expert -- What Do You

Think?

SEAri is continuously shaping our research agenda and seeks input from experts form the systems community. The following are examples of some potential research questions that SEAri researchers have proposed.

What do you think?

1. What are the leading indicators for ensuing human performance is being adequately considered when developing a system?

2. Would multi-sensory tradespace exploration improve how decisions are made?

3. What unique factors are involved in decision making for systems of systems programs?

4. How can systems engineering methods be validated in early phases of development?

We encourage your feedback on these or other research questions of interest that fall within the research scope of SEAri. (Please email [email protected] with your thoughts.)

Upcoming Events & Activities

Member Input Request

Fall 2008

December

November

16: SEAri/SDM Research Summit, Cambridge, MA October

4-7: ASME IDETC/CIE 2007, Las Vegas, NV -20: AIAA Space 2007, Long Beach, CA September

December

November

21: SEAri Research Summit, Cambridge, MA 23-24: MIT SDM Conference, Cambridge, MA

October

- 9-11: AIAA Space 2007, Long Beach, CA September

systems engineering advancement research initiative

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