Research
MM-ADM: A Model-Based Approach to Multidisciplinary Design to Support Automated Decision-Making
Summary
Design and development of complex engineered systems in the aerospace industry have been facing challenges in terms of managing ever increasing complexity. As the complexity of the system increases, so does the need for extensive collaboration between different disciplinary teams to manage the interdependencies between system elements. However, due to the complexity and integration challenges in current multidisciplinary design efforts, the behavior of the system may not be accurately predicted, and the project outcomes may not be aligned with what designers have in mind. Hence, we need to make better-informed decisions during the design and development of complex systems. This is one of the most prevalent challenges observed in the aerospace industry, especially in the integration phase of a product development, causing budget and schedule overruns.
In order to address these challenges, our research covers two main areas below:
heterogeneous data/knowledge representation/integration throughout the system design and development process
use of heterogeneous data/knowledge in data-driven techniques for several downstream tasks, such as decision-making, inconsistency identification, identification of missing knowledge, recommendation systems, etc.
Research Interests
We are particularly interested in the following open research questions:
How can we integrate the heterogeneous knowledge coming from semantic system models, physics-based engineering models, and mathematical models?
How big is the heterogeneous data and what's the best way to store it?
What data-driven algorithms can be used for the heterogeneous data to make sense of it?
How can systems engineers benefit from having access to the combined heterogeneous data?
We have started to answer some of these research questions, and we are in the process of publishing several papers. They will be posted here once they are published!
Armour R&D Student Projects
Multidisciplinary Design Representation in a Systems Engineering Environment
Description: The goal of this project is to build a descriptive multidisciplinary design workflow for aircraft design in systems modeling language (SysML). You’ll be learning how to model in SysML and create a descriptive model for a commercial aircraft. Then, we will connect this system model with a physics-based engineering tool, enabling interoperability. (Opportunity to publish.)
Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization (MDO) Framework for Future Aircraft Design
Description: The main objective is to build a multi-fidelity MDO framework for future aircraft design. You’ll be conducting a literature review on current MDO frameworks for aircraft design and the available tools for disciplinary analyses. Then, you’ll be creating a tool that would identify the interactions between the disciplines based on given requirements. (Opportunity to publish.)