Abstract: Fundamentals of Matrix-Analytic Methods targets advanced-level students in mathematics, engineering and computer science. It focuses on the fundamental parts of Matrix-Analytic Methods, Phase-Type Distributions, Markovian arrival processes and Structured Markov chains and matrix geometric solutions. New materials and techniques are presented for the first time in research and engineering design. This book emphasizes stochastic modeling by offering probabilistic interpretation and constructive proofs for Matrix-Analytic Methods. Such an approach is especially useful for engineering analysis and design. Exercises and examples are provided throughout the book.

Abstract: Due to an ever-decreasing supply in raw materials and stringent constraints on conventional energy sources, demand for lightweight, efficient and low-cost structures has become crucially important in modern engineering design. This requires engineers to search for optimal and robust design options to address design problems that are commonly large in scale and highly nonlinear, making finding solutions challenging. In the past two decades, metaheuristic algorithms have shown promising power, efficiency and versatility in solving these difficult optimization problems. This book examines the latest developments of metaheuristics and their applications in structural engineering, construction engineering and earthquake engineering, offering practical case studies as examples to demonstrate real-world applications. Topics cover a range of areas within engineering, including big bang-big crunch approach, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, harmony search, swarm intelligence and some other metaheuristic methods. Case studies include structural identification, vibration analysis and control, topology optimization, transport infrastructure design, design of reinforced concrete, performance-based design of structures and smart pavement management. With its wide range of everyday problems and solutions, Metaheursitic Applications in Structures and Infrastructures can serve as a supplementary text for design courses and computation in engineering as well as a reference for researchers and engineers in metaheuristics, optimization in civil engineering and computational intelligence.Review of the latest development of metaheuristics in engineering.Detailed algorithm descriptions with focus on practical implementation.Uses practical case studies as examples and applications.

Abstract: Digital controllers are part of nearly all modern personal, industrial, and transportation systems. Every senior or graduate student of electrical, chemical or mechanical engineering should therefore be familiar with the basic theory of digital controllers. This new text covers the fundamental principles and applications of digital control engineering, with emphasis on engineering design. Fadali and Visioli cover analysis and design of digitally controlled systems and describe applications of digital controls in a wide range of fields. With worked examples and Matlab applications in every chapter and many end-of-chapter assignments, this text provides both theory and practice for those coming to digital control engineering for the first time, whether as a student or practicing engineer. Extensive Use of computational tools: Matlab sections at end of each chapter show how to implement concepts from the chapter. Frees the student from the drudgery of mundane calculations and allows him to consider more subtle aspects of control system analysis and design. An engineering approach to digital controls: emphasis throughout the book is on design of control systems. Mathematics is used to help explain concepts, but throughout the text discussion is tied to design and implementation. For example coverage of analog controls in chapter 5 is not simply a review, but is used to show how analog control systems map to digital control systems. Review of Background Material: contains review material to aid understanding of digital control analysis and design. Examples include discussion of discrete-time systems in time domain and frequency domain (reviewed from linear systems course) and root locus design in s-domain and z-domain (reviewed from feedback control course). Inclusion of Advanced Topics In addition to the basic topics required for a one semester senior/graduate class, the text includes some advanced material to make it suitable for an introductory graduate level class or for two quarters at the senior/graduate level. Examples of optional topics are state-space methods, which may receive brief coverage in a one semester course, and nonlinear discrete-time systems. Minimal Mathematics Prerequisites The mathematics background required for understanding most of the book is based on what can be reasonably expected from the average electrical, chemical or mechanical engineering senior. This background includes three semesters of calculus, differential equations and basic linear algebra. Some texts on digital control require more mathematical maturity and are therefore beyond the reach of the typical senior.

Abstract: This thesis is written to advance the reader's knowledge of precision-engineering principles and their application to designing machines that achieve both sufficient precision and minimum cost. It provides the concepts and tools necessary for the engineer to create new precision machine designs. Four case studies demonstrate the principles and showcase approaches and solutions to specific problems that generally have wider applications. These come from projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in which the author participated: the Large Optics Diamond Turning Machine, Accuracy Enhancement of High- Productivity Machine Tools, the National Ignition Facility, and Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. Although broad in scope, the topics go into sufficient depth to be useful to practicing precision engineers and often fulfill more academic ambitions. The thesis begins with a chapter that presents significant principles and fundamental knowledge from the Precision Engineering literature. Following this is a chapter that presents engineering design techniques that are general and not specific to precision machines. All subsequent chapters cover specific aspects of precision machine design. The first of these is Structural Design, guidelines and analysis techniques for achieving independently stiff machine structures. The next chapter addresses dynamic stiffness by presenting several techniques for Deterministic Damping, damping designs that can be analyzed and optimized with predictive results. Several chapters present a main thrust of the thesis, Exact-Constraint Design. A main contribution is a generalized modeling approach developed through the course of creating several unique designs. The final chapter is the primary case study of the thesis, the Conceptual Design of a Horizontal Machining Center.

Abstract: Modern computational and experimental tools for aerodynamics and propulsion applications have matured to a stage where they can provide substantial insight into engineering processes involving fluid flows, and can be fruitfully utilized to help improve the design of practical devices. In particular, rapid and continuous development in aerospace engineering demands that new design concepts be regularly proposed to meet goals for increased performance, robustness and safety while concurrently decreasing cost. To date, the majority of the effort in design optimization of fluid dynamics has relied on gradient-based search algorithms. Global optimization methods can utilize the information collected from various sources and by different tools. These methods offer multi-criterion optimization, handle the existence of multiple design points and trade-offs via insight into the entire design space, can easily perform tasks in parallel, and are often effective in filtering the noise intrinsic to numerical and experimental data. However, a successful application of the global optimization method needs to address issues related to data requirements with an increase in the number of design variables, and methods for predicting the model performance. In this article, we review recent progress made in establishing suitable global optimization techniques employing neural network and polynomial-based response surface methodologies. Issues addressed include techniques for construction of the response surface, design of experiment techniques for supplying information in an economical manner, optimization procedures and multi-level techniques, and assessment of relative performance between polynomials and neural networks. Examples drawn from wing aerodynamics, turbulent diffuser flows, gas-gas injectors, and supersonic turbines are employed to help demonstrate the issues involved in an engineering design context. Both the usefulness of the existing knowledge to aid current design practices and the need for future research are identified.

Abstract: We propose a computational design approach to generate 3D models composed of interlocking planar pieces. We show how intricate 3D forms can be created by sliding the pieces into each other along straight slits, leading to a simple construction that does not require glue, screws, or other means of support. To facilitate the design process, we present an abstraction model that formalizes the main geometric constraints imposed by fabrication and assembly, and incorporates conditions on the rigidity of the resulting structure. We show that the tight coupling of constraints makes manual design highly nontrivial and introduce an optimization method to automate constraint satisfaction based on an analysis of the constraint relation graph. This algorithm ensures that the planar parts can be fabricated and assembled. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by creating 3D toy models, an architectural design study, and several examples of functional furniture.

Abstract: Today, coping with the different workflows, methods and tools of this inter-disciplinary approach to product development throughout a product’s life-cycle is the key challenge for a company. There is evidently a need for requirements engineering and management, as well as model-based design and engineering. More specifically, however, what is required is a unique and integrated methodology for requirements engineering and management, functional and logical design, as well as physical design in different domains for the multi-disciplinary development process based on a Systems Engineering approach early in the design process. In this paper, the RFLP approach (Requirements – Functional – Logical – Physical) will be presented as the baseline for model-based design with Systems Engineering that enable close interaction and collaboration between the different engineering disciplines render resources and processes more efficient, enhance quality, and ensure that the target system ultimately meets the requirements, while reducing design cycle time and engineering lead time.

Abstract: Mechanical Design Engineering Handbook is a straight-talking and forward-thinking reference covering the design, specification, selection, use and integration of machine elements fundamental to a wide range of engineering applications. You can develop or refresh your mechanical design skills in the areas of bearings, shafts, gears, seals, belts and chains, clutches and brakes, springs, fasteners, pneumatics and hydraulics, amongst other core mechanical elements, and dip in for principles, data and calculations as needed to inform and evaluate your on-the-job decisions. Covering the full spectrum of common mechanical and machine components that act as building blocks in the design of mechanical devices, Mechanical Design Engineering Handbook also includes worked design scenarios and essential background on design methodology to help you get started with a problem and repeat selection processes with successful results time and time again. This practical handbook will make an ideal shelf reference for those working in mechanical design across a variety of industries and a valuable learning resource for advanced students undertaking engineering design modules and projects as part of broader mechanical, aerospace, automotive and manufacturing programs. It offers clear, concise text that explains key component technology, with step-by-step procedures, fully worked design scenarios, component images and cross-sectional line drawings all incorporated for ease of understanding. It provides essential data, equations and interactive ancillaries, including calculation spreadsheets, to inform decision making, design evaluation and incorporation of components into overall designs. Design procedures and methods covered include references to national and international standards where appropriate.

Abstract: Change propagates, potentially affecting many aspects of a design and requiring much rework to implement. This article introduces a cross-domain approach to decompose a design and identify possible change propagation linkages, complemented by an interactive tool that generates dynamic checklists to assess change impact. The approach considers the information domains of requirements, functions, components, and the detail design process. Laboratory experiments using a vacuum cleaner suggest that cross-domain modelling helps analyse a design to create and capture the information required for change prediction. Further experiments using an electronic product show that this information, coupled with the interactive tool, helps to quickly and consistently assess the impact of a proposed change.

Abstract: There are many examples of cards used to assist or provide structure to the design process, yet there has not been a thorough articulation of the strengths and weaknesses of the various examples. We review eighteen card-based design tools in order to understand how they might benefit designers. The card-based tools are explained in terms of five design dimensions including the intended purpose and scope of use, duration of use, methodology, customization, and formal/material qualities. Our analysis suggests three design patterns or archetypes for existing card-based design method tools and highlights unexplored areas in the design space. The paper concludes with recommendations for the future development of card-based methods for the field of interaction design.

Abstract: Generalised Neuber Concept of Fictitious Notch Rounding.- Extended Stress Intensity Factor Concepts.- Local Strain Energy Density Concept.- Elastic-Plastic Fatigue Crack Growth.

Abstract: Design optimization without considering uncertainties of system variables and parameters can be problematic in real life. In order to take into account the effect of uncertainties, reliable and robust design schemes have proven effective, but limited studies have been reported to compare their difference in a multiobjective framework. This paper takes a typical vehicle structure subject to offset frontal crashing scenario as an example to compare reliable and robust designs with their deterministic counterpart. The thicknesses of some key components of vehicle frontal structures were selected as design variables, the vehicle weight and energy absorption as the objectives, deceleration and firewall intrusion as the constraints. The deterministic multiobjective optimization problem was first solved by adopting Design of Experimental (DOE), metamodels and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). Take into account the uncertainties, a Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) is adopted to generate random distributions of the objective and constraint functions for each design. For the reliability-based optimization the desired reliabilities of 90 %, 95 % and 99 % are considered, respectively. For the robustness-based optimization, two different formulation strategies are adopted. The optimization showed that the reliable and robust Pareto fronts are shifted away from their deterministic counterpart due to uncertainties. The different Pareto fronts yielded from the deterministic, reliable and robust designs are compared to provide some quantitative insights into how to apply these different design schemes for resolving uncertainty problems. It is shown that, compared with the baseline design, the optimizations enhance the crashworthiness of vehicle, though more conservative solutions could have been generated from the reliable and robust optimizations.

Abstract: The type of mathematical modeling selected for the optimum design problems of steel skeletal frames affects the size and mathematical complexity of the programming problem obtained. Survey on the structural optimization literature reveals that there are basically two types of design optimization formulation. In the first type only cross sectional properties of frame members are taken as design variables. In such formulation when the values of design variables change during design cycles, it becomes necessary to analyze the structure and update the response of steel frame to the external loading. Structural analysis in this type is a complementary part of the design process. In the second type joint coordinates are also treated as design variables in addition to the cross sectional properties of members. Such formulation eliminates the necessity of carrying out structural analysis in every design cycle. The values of the joint displacements are determined by the optimization techniques in addition to cross sectional properties. The structural optimization literature contains structural design algorithms that make use of both type of formulation. In this study a review is carried out on mathematical and metaheuristic algorithms where the effect of the mathematical modeling on the efficiency of these algorithms is discussed.

Abstract: Menu systems are challenging to design because design spaces are immense, and several human factors affect user behavior. This paper contributes to the design of menus with the goal of interactively assisting designers with an optimizer in the loop. To reach this goal, 1) we extend a predictive model of user performance to account for expectations as to item groupings; 2) we adapt an ant colony optimizer that has been proven efficient for this class of problems; and 3) we present MenuOptimizer, a set of inter-actions integrated into a real interface design tool (QtDesigner). MenuOptimizer supports designers' abilities to cope with uncertainty and recognize good solutions. It allows designers to delegate combinatorial problems to the optimizer, which should solve them quickly enough without disrupting the design process. We show evidence that satisfactory menu designs can be produced for complex problems in minutes.

Abstract: We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open - enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design.

Abstract: The product race has become an innovation race, reconciling challenges of branding, performance, time to market and competitive pricing while complying with ecological, safety and legislation constraints. The answer lies in “smart” products of high complexity, relying on heterogeneous technologies and involving active components. To keep pace with this evolution and further accelerate the design cycle, the design engineering process must be rethought. The paper presents a mechatronic simulation approach to achieve this goal. The starting point is the current virtual prototyping paradigm that is widely adopted and that continues to improve in terms of model complexity, accuracy, robustness and automated optimization. Two evolutions are discussed. A first one is the extension to multi-physics simulation answering the design needs of the inherent multi-disciplinarity of “intelligent” products. Integration of thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, haptic and electrical functions requires simulation to extend beyond the traditional CAD-FEM approach, supporting the use of system, functional and perception models. The second evolution is the integration of control functions in the products. Where current industrial practice treats mechanical system design and control design as different design loops, this paper discusses their integration in a model-based design process at all design stages, turning concepts such as software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop into basic elements of an industrial design approach. These concepts are illustrated by a number of automotive design engineering cases, which demonstrate that the combined use of perception, geometric and system models allows to develop innovative solutions for the active safety, low-emission and high-comfort performance of next-generation vehicles. This process in turn poses new challenges to the design in terms of the specification and validation of such innovative products, including their failure modes and fault-tolerant behaviour. This will imply adopting a model-based system engineering approach that is currently already common practice in software engineering.

Abstract: Computer-aided full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis has been used in microwave engineering for the past decade. Initially, its main application area was design verification. Today, EM-simulation-driven optimization and design closure become increasingly important due to the complexity of microwave structures and increasing demands for accuracy. In many situations, theoretical models of microwave structures can only be used to yield the initial designs that need to be further fine-tuned to meet given performance requirements. In addition, EM-based design is a must for a growing number of microwave devices such as ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas, dielectric resonator antennas and substrate-integrated circuits. For circuits like these, no design-ready theoretical models are available, so design improvement can only be obtained through geometry adjustments based on repetitive, time-consuming simulations. On the other hand, various interactions between microwave devices and their environment, such as feeding structures and housing, must be taken into account, and this is only possible through full-wave EM analysis. Electromagnetic simulations can be highly accurate, but they tend to be computationally expensive. Therefore, practical design optimization methods have to be computationally efficient, so that the number of CPU-intensive high-fidelity EM simulations is reduced as much as possible during the design process. For the same reasons, techniques for creating fast yet accurate models of microwave structures become crucially important. In this edited book, the authors strive to review the state-of-the-art simulation-driven microwave design optimization and modeling. A group of international experts specialized in various aspects of microwave computer-aided design summarize and review a wide range of the latest developments and real-world applications. Topics include conventional and surrogate-based design optimization techniques, methods exploiting adjoint sensitivity, simulation-based tuning, space mapping, and several modeling methodologies, such as artificial neural networks and kriging. Applications and case studies include microwave filters, antennas, substrate integrated structures and various active components and circuits. The book also contains a few introductory chapters highlighting the fundamentals of optimization and modeling, gradient-based and derivative-free algorithms, metaheuristics, and surrogate-based optimization techniques, as well as finite difference and finite element methods. Readership: Graduates, lecturers, and researchers in electrical engineering, as well as engineers who use numerical optimization in their design work. This book will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of microwave engineering, antenna design, and computational electromagnetics.

Abstract: Design and Technology education is potentially a rich environment for successful learning, if the management of the whole design process is emphasised, and students’ design thinking is promoted. The aim of the present study was to unfold the collaborative design process of one team of elementary students, in order to understand their multimodal ways of design thinking. The videotaped design episodes of the team constitute the data source of the study. CORDTRA diagrams were used for opening up the design process, providing means to analyse the complex and iterative process in a structured manner. The results indicate that the students’ design thinking was collaborative, materially mediated, and embodied in nature. Engaging in various concrete and material, as well as epistemic and conceptual activities provided the students with opportunities to learn the foundational design skills. Further, the multifaceted design process integrated skills needed for learning also something other than design.

Abstract: A review of decision research suggests that the design stage is a neglected aspect of the decision-making pro- cess. This study develops a conceptual model for analyzing the design of alternatives in organizations, and applies it in three case studies. The model has two basic dimensions which may affect the range and quality of options generated in the design process. One is the mix and type of creativity and search; the other is the degree and type of closure to other phases of decision making. Comparative analysis of the cases offers qualified support for the hypotheses, and clear evidence that the im- pact of alternatives design on decision outcomes warrants greater attention to this stage of the decision- making process.

Abstract: A procedure for analyzing and designing elastically tailored composite laminates using the STAGS finite element solver has been presented. The methodology used to produce the elastic tailoring, namely computer-controlled steering of unidirectionally reinforced composite material tows, has been reduced to a handful of design parameters along with a selection of construction methods. The generality of the tow-steered ply definition provides the user a wide variety of options for laminate design, which can be automatically incorporated with any finite element model that is composed of STAGS shell elements. Furthermore, the variable stiffness parameterization is formulated so that manufacturability can be assessed during the design process, plus new ideas using tow steering concepts can be easily integrated within the general framework of the elastic tailoring definitions. Details for the necessary implementation of the tow-steering definitions within the STAGS hierarchy is provided, and the format of the ply definitions is discussed in detail to provide easy access to the elastic tailoring choices. Integration of the automated STAGS solver with laminate design software has been demonstrated, so that the large design space generated by the tow-steering options can be traversed effectively. Several design problems are presented which confirm the usefulness of the design tool as well as further establish the potential of tow-steered plies for laminate design.