Data Driven Uncertainty Evaluation for Complex Engineered System Design

Complex engineered systems are often difficult to analyze and design due to the tangled interdependencies among their subsystems and components. Conventional design methods often need exact modeling or accurate structure decomposition, which limits their practical application. The rapid expansion of data makes utilizing data to guide and improve system design indispensable in practical engineering. In this paper, a data driven uncertainty evaluation approach is proposed to support the design of complex engineered systems. The core of the approach is a data-mining based uncertainty evaluation method that predicts the uncertainty level of a specific system design by means of analyzing association relations along different system attributes and synthesizing the information entropy of the covered attribute areas, and a quantitative measure of system uncertainty can be obtained accordingly. Monte Carlo simulation is introduced to get the uncertainty extrema, and the possible data distributions under different situations is discussed in detail The uncertainty values can be normalized using the simulation results and the values can be used to evaluate different system designs. A prototype system is established, and two case studies have been carded out. The case of an inverted pendulum system validates the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the case of an oil sump design shows the practicability when two or more design plans need to be compared. This research can be used to evaluate the uncertainty of complex engineered systems completely relying on data, and is ideally suited for plan selection and performance analysis in system design.

Special Issue on Innovative Design of Complex Products

With the development of science and technology as well as the diversification and individualization of market demand,modern products update more and more rapidly.e rapid development of new products to satisfy the increasingly improved and personalized customer demands greatly depends on the progress in the innovative design theory and performance optimization

Product Data Model for Performance-driven Design

When designing large-sized complex machinery products, the design focus is always on the overall per- formance; however, there exist no design theory and method based on performance driven. In view of the defi- ciency of the existing design theory, according to the performance features of complex mechanical products, the performance indices are introduced into the traditional design theory of ＂Requirement-Function-Structure＂ to construct a new five-domain design theory of ＂Client Requirement-Function-Performance-Structure-Design Parameter＂. To support design practice based on this new theory, a product data model is established by using per- formance indices and the mapping relationship between them and the other four domains. When the product data model is applied to high-speed train design and combining the existing research result and relevant standards, the corresponding data model and its structure involving five domains of high-speed trains are established, which can provide technical support for studying the relationships between typical performance indices and design parame- ters and the fast achievement of a high-speed train scheme design. The five domains provide a reference for the design specification and evaluation criteria of high speed train and a new idea for the train＇s parameter design.

Metric Based Evaluation and Improvement of Software Designs

The demand for quality software expands as the business environment grows internationally. Common to all software development methodologies is a design phase that focuses on the physical software model. Design criteria used to evaluate these models are important for refinement and improvement. The purpose of this research is to apply transformations of McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity as a means for improving software design and assessing risks within a design. In this research, two metrics, the management (CMGT) and maintenance (CMN) coefficients are introduced, and they are used to address the architectural, size, and quality dimensions of a software design.

“Noisy”issues in road acoustics:A white paper

Despite almost a century of studies dealing with traffic noise,researchers and practitioners still face old and new issues when designing a low-noise pavement.Given that,this manuscript aims at focusing on a number of unsolved questions,namely theoretical or technological.1)Is it viable to balance diverse road-related needs(i.e.,noise,expected life,texture levels,and friction)?2)How much does the pavement material affect its acoustic performance(the remaining factors being constant)?3)How much reliable is the relationship between road texture and mixture aggregate gradation?Based on the analysis of these issues,it emerges that:1)optimal pavement design involves complex mix optimization and there are theoretical and practical bases to set up a balanced approach to address the complexity of pavement design;2)high percentages of crumb rubber could optimise road acoustic response but this latter has a relationship with the tyre/road noise(expressed,for example,in terms of close proximity index)that calls for further investigation;3)aggregate gradation appears to be a reliable basis to predict surface texture and therefore,under given boundary conditions,tyre/road noise;and 4)further studies and investigations are needed in terms of local calibration of deterioration curves and setting up of a sound method to assess the frequency response of asphalt concretes and to govern on-site noise indicators based on mixture properties.

A New Generalized Complex Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes

Recent research challenges in the wireless communication include the usage of diversity and efficient coding to improve data transmission quality and spectral efficiency. Space diversity uses multiple transmitting and/or receiving antennas to create independent fading channels without penalty in bandwidth efficiency. Space-time block coding is an encoding scheme for communication over Rayleigh fading channels using multiple transmitting antennas. Space-time block codes from complex orthogonal designs exist only for two transmitting antennas. This paper generalizes a new complex orthogonal space-time block code for four transmitting antennas, whose decoding complexity is very low. Simulations show that the generalized complex orthogonal space-time block code has low bit error rate, full rate and possibly large diversity.

Software Analytics of Open Source Business Software

This paper applies software analytics to open source code. Open-source software gives both individuals and businesses the flexibility to work with different parts of available code to modify it or incorporate it into their own project. The open source software market is growing. Major companies such as AWS, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, SAP, Cisco, Intel, and Tesla have joined the open source software community. In this study, a sample of 40 open source applications was selected. Traditional McCabe software metrics including cyclomatic and essential complexities were examined. An analytical comparison of this set of metrics and derived metrics for high risk software was utilized as a basis for addressing risk management in the adoption and integration decisions of open source software. From this comparison, refinements were added, and contemporary concepts of design and data metrics derived from cyclomatic complexity were integrated into a classification scheme for software quality. It was found that 84% of the sample open source applications were classified as moderate low risk or low risk indicating that open source software exhibits low risk characteristics. The 40 open source applications were the base data for the model resulting in a technique which is applicable to any open source code regardless of functionality, language, or size.

Software Metric Analysis of Open-Source Business Software

Over the past decade, open-source software use has grown. Today, many companies including Google, Microsoft, Meta, RedHat, MongoDB, and Apache are major participants of open-source contributions. With the increased use of open-source software or integration of open-source software into custom-developed software, the quality of this software component increases in importance. This study examined a sample of open-source applications from GitHub. Static software analytics were conducted, and each application was classified for its risk level. In the analyzed applications, it was found that 90% of the applications were classified as low risk or moderate low risk indicating a high level of quality for open-source applications.

A Multidisciplinary Optimization Architecture for A Distributed Computing Environment

This paper introduces a distributed computing approach for multidisciplinary complex product design. The framework that may aid in the implementation of this scheme is described. This distributed design environment has the property of concurrent engineering. The approaches considered here are the framework of a distributed optimization design environment and the optimization architecture in the environment.

The Distribution Search:An O(n) Expected Time Search

Provided an algorithm for the distribution search and proves the time complexity of the algorithm. This algorithm uses a mathematical formula to search n elements in the sequence of n elements in O(n)expected time,and experimental reesult proves that distribution search is superior to binary search.

An agent-supported approach for the collaborative design of complex systems

A novel approach for partitioning and coordinating the collaborative design optimization of complex systems is described.A partitioning metric has been formulated to select the best partitioning solutions among the total possibilities of dividing the complex design optimization problem.Then,an agent-supported approach is used for the coordination of the collaborative design optimization.The approach has been applied to the case of a preliminary design of an electric vehicle,to demonstrate how various agents can effectively communicate with each other to provide support to the collaborative design optimization of complex systems.

Design and analysis of superlens based on complex two-dimensional square lattice photonic crystal

We theoretically demonstrate the imaging properties of a complex two-dimensional(2D) face-centered square lattice photonic crystal(PC) made from germanium cylinders in air background. The finitedifference time-domain(FDTD) method is employed to calculate the band structure and simulate image construction. The band diagram of the complex structure is significantly compressed. Negative refraction occurs in the second energy band with negative phase velocity at a frequency of 0.228(2πc/a), which is lower than results from previous studies. Lower negative refraction frequency leads to higher image resolution. Numerical results show that the spatial resolution of the system reaches 0.7296λ, which is lower than the incident wavelength.