Events

ABSTRACT | Complexity is often considered the “big bad” for engineering design.  The most common design principle is to “keep it simple” as complex systems tend to increase the cost of the product, decreases the useability and maintainability, increases the potential for failure, or increases the time to market.  Essentially, complexity is often a surrogate for many other requirements and measures of goodness for design.  Thus, we want to be able to measure complexity of a design problem, process, or product to provide insights into these other measures that are of true interest.  In this presentation, we will look at how to measure complexity (size, coupling, and solvability) and how to use these metrics of complexity to predict product performance values that have apparently no direct or strong relationship to the models explored.  This is done by using multiple complexity measures to train a crowd of artificial neural networks (ANN Crowd) to predict market price from function structures, for instance.  Ultimately, the case is made to not try to integrate complexity into a single metric, but to consider multiple points of view to expose deeper patterns and meanings in early-stage design representations.

BIO | Joshua D. Summers is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the Jonsson School at the University of Texas at Dallas, joining in 2021.  Dr. Summers earned his Ph.D. from ASU (design automation) and his MS (VR based submarine design) and BS (fluidized bed design) from University of Missouri.  He has worked at the Naval Research Laboratory (VR Lab and NCARAI).  He was formerly a Professor at Clemson University (2002-2020).  Dr. Summers’ research has been funded by government, large industry, and small-medium sized enterprises.  His areas of interest include collaborative design, knowledge management, and design enabler development with the overall objective of improving design through collaboration and computation.  Dr. Summers’ greatest contributions are made through his mentoring of graduate students and other colleagues – developing people is his true passion.  Eleven former students are currently teaching design as faculty.