Flexibility in Engineering Design

Flexibility in Engineering Design PDF Author: Richard De Neufville
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
A guide to using the power of design flexibility to improve the performance of complex technological projects, for designers, managers, users, and analysts. Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects—such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals—must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.

Flexibility in Engineering Design

Flexibility in Engineering Design PDF Author: Richard De Neufville
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
A guide to using the power of design flexibility to improve the performance of complex technological projects, for designers, managers, users, and analysts. Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects—such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals—must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.

Software Design for Flexibility

Software Design for Flexibility PDF Author: Chris Hanson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262362473
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Strategies for building large systems that can be easily adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications. Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a narrow purpose, with no room to grow. But the best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code. The authors describe techniques they have found effective--over their combined 100-plus years of programming experience--that will help programmers avoid programming themselves into corners. The authors explore ways to enhance flexibility by: Organizing systems using combinators to compose mix-and-match parts, ranging from small functions to whole arithmetics, with standardized interfaces Augmenting data with independent annotation layers, such as units of measurement or provenance Combining independent pieces of partial information using unification or propagation Separating control structure from problem domain with domain models, rule systems and pattern matching, propagation, and dependency-directed backtracking Extending the programming language, using dynamically extensible evaluators

Real Options in Engineering Design, Operations, and Management

Real Options in Engineering Design, Operations, and Management PDF Author: Harriet Black Nembhard
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 142007170X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Given that engineering flexibility can potentially provide a competitive advantage, the question then becomes: Precisely how valuable is this flexibility? However, traditional methods often fail to accurately capture the economic value of investments in an environment of widespread uncertainty and rapid change. The real options method represents th

Design for Flexibility

Design for Flexibility PDF Author: Guy André Boy
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030763919
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Design for flexibility requires anticipation, preparation, creativity and experience. Future highly digital sociotechnical systems should contrast with those stemming from technology-centered engineering that produces objects and machines with the immensely codified and rigid practices we know today. Most of the time, current technologies are designed and developed for normal situations, leaving users to manage abnormal and emergency situations themselves, sometimes under unforeseen, extreme and/or dangerous conditions. Putting humans at the center of the design of flexible sociotechnical systems means visualizing possible futures, modeling them, simulating them and leading them down the right paths. This book is for the engineering designers, who seek to better understand the roles of humans and organizations developing complex life-critical systems. It is also for those who train future designers who will have to take into account the well-being, safety, sustainability and efficiency of the actors of future sociotechnical systems. It is about an emergent discipline, human systems integration (HSI). The aim of the flexibility challenge is to put the artificial at the service of the natural, and not the other way around. The author, an aerospace engineering designer, has worked for 40 years in the field of human-centered design (HCD) of complex systems, discovering repeatedly that automation leads to rigidity, especially when things go wrong. It is urgent we had a new paradigm where flexibility is a major asset in human systems integration. HCD is seen here as the combination of practices and technologies to come.

Engineering Design Communication

Engineering Design Communication PDF Author: Shawna D. Lockhart
Publisher: Peachpit Press
ISBN: 9780137057146
Category : Engineering design
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This text presents a different approach to the traditional engineering graphics course by emphasizing the importance of sketching, 3D solid modelling and the use of design data bases throughout the engineering process.

A Guide for Achieving Flexibility in Highway Design

A Guide for Achieving Flexibility in Highway Design PDF Author:
Publisher: AASHTO
ISBN: 1560512598
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Context-sensitive solutions (CSS) reflect the need to consider highway projects as more than just transportation facilities. Depending on how highway projects are integrated into the community, they can have far-reaching impacts beyond their traffic or transportation function. CSS is a comprehensive process that brings stakeholders together in a positive, proactive environment to develop projects that not only meet transportation needs, but also improve or enhance the community. Achieving a flexible, context-sensitive design solution requires designers to fully understand the reasons behind the processes, design values, and design procedures that are used. This AASHTO Guide shows highway designers how to think flexibly, how to recognize the many choices and options they have, and how to arrive at the best solution for the particular situation or context. It also strives to emphasize that flexible design does not necessarily entail a fundamentally new design process, but that it can be integrated into the existing transportation culture. This publication represents a major step toward institutionalizing CSS into state transportation departments and other agencies charged with transportation project development.

Mobile Information Systems

Mobile Information Systems PDF Author: Barbara Pernici
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540310088
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This book presents a framework for mobile information systems, focusing on quality of service and adaptability at all architectural levels. These levels range from adaptive applications to e-services, middleware, and infrastructural elements, as developed in the "Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems" (MAIS) project. The design models, methods, and tools developed in the project allow the realization of adaptive mobile information systems in a variety of different architectures.

Improving Engineering Design

Improving Engineering Design PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309044782
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Effective design and manufacturing, both of which are necessary to produce high-quality products, are closely related. However, effective design is a prerequisite for effective manufacturing. This new book explores the status of engineering design practice, education, and research in the United States and recommends ways to improve design to increase U.S. industry's competitiveness in world markets.

Design of Flexible Production Systems

Design of Flexible Production Systems PDF Author: Tullio Tolio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540854142
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In the last decade, the production of mechanical components to be assembled in final products produced in high volumes (e.g. cars, mopeds, industrial vehicles, etc.) has undergone deep changes due to the overall modifications in the way companies compete. Companies must consider competitive factors such as short lead times, tight product tolerances, frequent market changes and cost reduction. Anyway, companies often have to define production objectives as trade-offs among these critical factors since it can be difficult to improve all of them. Even if system flexibility is often considered a fundamental requirement for firms, it is not always a desirable characteristic of a system because it requires relevant investment cost which can jeopardize the profitability of the firm. Dedicated systems are not able to adapt to changes of the product characteristics while flexible systems offer more flexibility than what is needed, thus increasing investment and operative costs. Production contexts characterized by mid to high demand volume of well identified families of products in continuous evolution do not require the highest level of flexibility; therefore, manufacturing system flexibility must be rationalized and it is necessary to find out the best trade-off between productivity and flexibility by designing manufacturing systems endowed with the right level of flexibility required by the production problem. This new class of production systems can be named Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems-FFMSs. The flexibility degree in FFMSs is related to their ability to cope with volume, mix and technological changes, and it must take into account both present and future changes. The required level of system flexibility impacts on the architecture of the system and the explicit design of flexibility often leads to hybrid systems, i.e. automated integrated systems in which parts can be processed by both general purpose and dedicated machines. This is a key issue of FFMSs and results from the matching of flexibility and productivity that respectively characterize FMSs and Dedicated Manufacturing Systems (DMSs). The market share of the EU in the machine tool sector is 44%; the introduction of focused flexibility would be particularly important for machine tool builders whose competitive advantage is based on the ability of customizing their systems on the basis of needs of their customers. In fact, even if current production contexts frequently present situations which would fit well with the FFMS approach, tradition and know-how of machine tool builders play a crucial role. Firms often agree with the focused flexibility vision, nevertheless they decide not to pay the risk and efforts related to the design of this new system architecture. This is due also to the lack of well-structured design approaches which can help machine tool builders to configure innovative systems. Therefore, the FFMS topic is studied through the book chapters following a shared mission: "To define methodologies and tools to design production systems with a minimum level of flexibility needed to face, during their lifecycle, the product and process evolution both in the technological and demand aspects. The goal is to find out the optimal trade-off between flexibility and productivity". The book framework follows the architecture which has been developed to address the FFMS Design problem. This architecture is both broad and detailed, since it pays attention to all the relevant levels in a firm hierarchy which are involved in the system design. Moreover, the architecture is innovative because it models both the point of view of the machine tool builder and the point of view of the system user. The architecture starts analyzing Manufacturing Strategy issues and generating the possible demand scenario to be faced. Technological aspects play a key role while solving process plan problems for the products in the part family. Strategic and technological data becomes input when a machine tool builder performs system configuration. The resulting system configurations are possible solutions that a system user considers when planning its system capacity. All the steps of the architecture are deeply studied, developing methods and tools to address each subproblem. Particular attention is paid to the methodologies adopted to face the different subproblems: mathematical programming, stochastic programming, simulation techniques and inverse kinematics have been used. The whole architecture provides a general approach to implement the right degree of flexibility and it allows to study how different aspects and decisions taken in a firm impact on each other. The work presented in the book is innovative because it gives links among different research fields, such as Manufacturing Strategy, Process Plan, System Design, Capacity Planning and Performance Evaluation; moreover, it helps to formalize and rationalize a critical area such as manufacturing system flexibility. The addressed problem is relevant at an academic level but, also, at an industrial level. A great deal of industrial sectors need to address the problem of designing systems with the right degree of flexibility; for instance, automotive, white goods, electrical and electronic goods industries, etc. Attention to industrial issues is confirmed by empirical studies and real case analyses which are presented within the book chapters.

Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications

Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications PDF Author: Steven D. Eppinger
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300656
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
An introduction to a powerful and flexible network modeling tool for developing and understanding complex systems, with many examples from a range of industries. Design structure matrix (DSM) is a straightforward and flexible modeling technique that can be used for designing, developing, and managing complex systems. DSM offers network modeling tools that represent the elements of a system and their interactions, thereby highlighting the system's architecture (or designed structure). Its advantages include compact format, visual nature, intuitive representation, powerful analytical capacity, and flexibility. Used primarily so far in the area of engineering management, DSM is increasingly being applied to complex issues in health care management, financial systems, public policy, natural sciences, and social systems. This book offers a clear and concise explanation of DSM methods for practitioners and researchers.