"Collage of products and systems: architecture, biomedical, aerospace, automotive, robotics, electronics, and shipping"

 

2007 Frontiers in Design & Simulation Workshop

Wednesday, May 16, 2007.
(with social event on Tuesday evening after the CPDA workshop)
Georgia Institute of Technology Campus
Atlanta, GA


Speaker: Tim Simpson

Bio:
Dr. Simpson joined the Penn State faculty in Fall 1998 and is a Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and Engineering Design. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1998 and 1995, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1994. He teaches courses on Product Family Design, Mass Customization, Concurrent Engineering, and Product Dissection. His research interests include product family and product platform design optimization, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), trade space exploration, and multidimensional visualization. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award and the 2005 SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. He has received several awards for outstanding research and teaching at Penn State, including the 2007 Penn State University President's Award for Excellence in Academic Integration. He is Director of the Product Realization Minor at Penn State and is active in ASME, AIAA, and ASEE. He is the incoming Chair of the AIAA MDO Technical Committee, an elected member of the ASME Design Automation Executive Committee, and the Conference Chair for the 2007 ASME Design Automation Conference and 2007 AIAA MDO Specialist Conference. He is also an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, the International Journal of Mass Customization, and Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.

Talk: How to visualize system-level trade spaces effectively in support of collaborative decision-making?

Recent advancements in computing power and speed allow designers to simulate and evaluate thousands, if not millions, of design alternatives more cheaply and quickly than ever before. These advancements provide new opportunities to revolutionize trade space exploration, particularly for the design of complex systems such as automobiles, aircraft, and spacecraft. In this talk, I will first demonstrate a data visualization tool that allows designers to explore multidimensional trade spaces to understand relationships between variables, visualize the feasible trade space, and help them form their preference to select the best design. This visualization tool allows designers to "shop" for the best design using any combination of glyph, 1-D and 2-D histogram, 2-D scatter, scatter matrix, and parallel coordinate plots; linked views; brushing; and preference shading and Pareto filtering. I will then introduce the latest Visual Steering Commands to support trade space exploration and demonstrate their use within this multidimensional visualization tool. In particular, we have defined three novel user-guided samplers that enable designers to explore (1) the entire design space, (2) near a point of interest, or (3) within a region of high preference. A vehicle configuration model that evaluates the technical feasibility of new vehicle concepts is used to illustrate how these three samplers can be used for trade space exploration. Ongoing and future research will also be discussed.