Systems Engineering Commons^™

A Primer On The Human Readiness Level Scale (Ansi/Hfes 400-2021), Kelly Steelman, Holly Handley, Katie Plant (Ed.), Gesa Praetorius (Ed.)

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

"The Human Readiness Level (HRL) Scale is a simple 9-level scale for evaluating, tracking, and communicating the readiness of a technology for safe and effective human use. It is modeled after the well-established Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework that is used throughout the government and industry to communicate the maturity of a technology and to support decision making about technology acquisition. Here we (1) introduce the ANSI/HFES 400-2021 Standard that defines the HRL scale and (2) provide concrete examples of evaluation activities to support the application of HRLs in the development of automated driving systems."

Machine Learning In Requirements Elicitation: A Literature Review, Cheligeer Cheligeer, Jingwei Huang, Guosong Wu, Nadia Bhuiyan, Yuan Xu, Yong Zeng

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A growing trend in requirements elicitation is the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the cumbersome requirement handling process. This literature review summarizes and analyzes studies that incorporate ML and natural language processing (NLP) into demand elicitation. We answer the following research questions: (1) What requirement elicitation activities are supported by ML? (2) What data sources are used to build ML-based requirement solutions? (3) What technologies, algorithms, and tools are used to build ML-based requirement elicitation? (4) How to construct an ML-based requirements elicitation method? (5) What are the available tools to support ML-based requirements elicitation methodology? Keywords …

Theorizing The Initial Response Of Countries In Bringing Covid-19 Pandemic Under Control: The Effect Of Change Readiness Of Countries, M. Mahdi Moeini Gharagozloo, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Chen Chen, Mozhgan Moeini Gharagozloo

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Pandemic crises can bring the biggest and deepest shocks to countries around the world. In the first quarter of 2020, a global pandemic named “COVID-19” spread all over the world and not only took so many lives and created so much fear but also brought a tremendous financial pain as a result of shutting down economies to fight with this unknown contagious virus. This paper examines how countries’ change readiness enables them to bring the spread of an international crisis under control. We propose that higher levels of change readiness would help countries to cope with risks and uncertainties generated …

System And Risk Analysis Of Cloud Manufacturing System, Trupti Narayan Rane

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The Cloud manufacturing(C-Mfg) system involves remote distributed manufacturing resources and capabilities collaborating as a single virtual entity. The system receives orders for custom products and provides manufacturing as a service to the end customers. The primary activities of the system, among others, are transaction control, resource allocation and monitoring, distributed manufacturing, quality control, and delivery of consignments to the customers. The actual manufacturing is done by a network of third-party partner manufacturers providing the services to end customers, helping them with cost reduction, shorter time-to-market, and enabling efficient collaboration between manufacturers in the CMfg network. This paper aims to deep …

Model-Based Systems Engineering For A Small-Lift Launch Facility, Walter Mcgee Taraila, Sharanabasaweshwara Asundi

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

A study of model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) applied to a small‐lift launch facility is presented. The research uses Systems Modeling Language (SysML) products and functional diagrams to document the ground systems on a launch pad servicing a small class payload (0–2 tons). With the projected growth in launch cadence of small‐lift rockets in the coming decade, there is a need to design increasingly complex launch systems with greater efficiency. The potential improvements in project communication, quality, and productivity are explored by developing a model following the ISO/IEC 15288 technical process framework and the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Object‐Oriented …

A Unified Health Information System Framework For Connecting Data, People, Devices, And Systems, Wu He, Justin Zuopeng Zhang, Huanmei Wu, Wenzhuo Li, Sachin Shetty

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the necessity for pervasive data and system interoperability to manage healthcare information and knowledge. There is an urgent need to better understand the role of interoperability in improving the societal responses to the pandemic. This paper explores data and system interoperability, a very specific area that could contribute to fighting COVID-19. Specifically, the authors propose a unified health information system framework to connect data, systems, and devices to increase interoperability and manage healthcare information and knowledge. A blockchain-based solution is also provided as a recommendation for improving the data and system interoperability in healthcare.

Simulation-Based Optimization: Implications Of Complex Adaptive Systems And Deep Uncertainty, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Within the modeling and simulation community, simulation-based optimization has often been successfully used to improve productivity and business processes. However, the increased importance of using simulation to better understand complex adaptive systems and address operations research questions characterized by deep uncertainty, such as the need for policy support within socio-technical systems, leads to the necessity to revisit the way simulation can be applied in this new area. Similar observations can be made for complex adaptive systems that constantly change their behavior, which is reflected in a continually changing solution space. Deep uncertainty describes problems with inadequate or incomplete information about …

Combining Green Metrics And Digital Twins For Sustainability Planning And Governance Of Smart Buildings And Cities, Casey R. Corrado, Suzanne M. Delong, Emily G. Holt, Edward Y. Hua, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes …

Grounding Evaluation Capacity Development In Systems Theory, Sarah D. Klier, Raphael J. Nawrotzki, Nataly Salas-Rodríguez, Sven Harten, Charles B. Keating, Polinpapilinho F. Katina

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

While “systemic thinking” is popular in the context of capacity development and evaluation, there is currently a lack of understanding about the benefits to employing systems theory in evaluation capacity development. Systems theory provides a useful orientation to the work involved in complex systems (e.g. national evaluation systems). This article illustrates how evaluation capacity development practitioners can use systems theory as a conceptual tool to gain a better understanding of the functional aspects and interrelationships present within a given evaluation system. Specifically, the systems theory perspective can help elucidate the reasons for the success or failure of a given evaluation …

A Human Factors Study Of Risk Management Of Complex Agile Scrum Projects In Large Enterprises, Ravi Kalluri

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Agile Project Management methods have gained phenomenal success in the IT software world in managing projects of high complexity and uncertainty. However, Agile projects come with their unique set of risks. This paper seeks to explore the risks posed by human factors to complex Agile Scrum projects in large enterprises. Project Risk Management is crucial in determining the future performance of a complex project. Increasing project complexity makes it more and more difficult to anticipate potential events that could affect the project and to make effective decisions to reduce project risk exposure. This is even more true for Agile projects …

Importance Measure-Based Maintenance Strategy Considering Maintenance Costs, Chao Zhang, Yadong Zhang, Hongyan Dui, Shaoping Wang, Mileta M. Tomovic

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Maintenance is an important way to ensure the best performance of repairable systems. This paper considers how to reduce system maintenance cost while ensuring consistent system performance. Due to budget constraints, preventive maintenance (PM) can be done on only some of the system components. Also, different selections of components to be maintained can have markedly different effects on system performance. On the basis of the above issues, this paper proposes an importance-based maintenance priority (IBMP) model to guide the selection of PM components. Then the model is extended to find the degree of correlation between two components to be maintained …

Performance Degradation Based On Importance Change And Application In Dissimilar Redundancy Actuation System, Yadong Zhang, Chao Zhang, Shaoping Wang, Rentong Chen, Mileta M. Tomovic

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

The importance measure is a crucial method to identify and evaluate the system weak link. It is widely used in the optimization design and maintenance decision of aviation, aerospace, nuclear energy and other systems. The dissimilar redundancy actuation system (DRAS) is a key aircraft control subsystem which performs aircraft attitude and flight trajectory control. Its performance and reliability directly affect the aircraft flight quality and flight safety. This paper considers the influence of the Birnbaum importance measure (BIM) and integrated importance measure (IIM) on the reliability changes of key components in DRAS. The differences of physical fault characteristics of different …

A Formal Power Series Approach To Multiplicative Dynamic And Static Output Feedback, Venkatesh Subbarao Guggilam

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The goal of the paper is two-fold. The first of which is to derive an explicit formula to compute the generating series of a closed-loop system when a plant, given in a Chen-Fliess series description is in multiplicative output feedback connection with another system given in Chen-Fliess series description. In addition, the multiplicative dynamic output feedback connection has a natural interpretation as a transformation group acting on the plant. The second of the two-part goal of this paper is same as the first part albeit when the Chen-Fliess series in the feedback is replaced by a memoryless map, so called …

Systems Statistical Engineering – Hierarchical Fuzzy Constraint Propagation, Hengameh Fakhravar, Hesamoddin Tahami

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Driven by a growing requirement during the 21st century for the integration of rigorous statistical analyses in engineering research, there has been a movement within the statistics and quality communities to evolve a unified statistical engineering body of knowledge (Hoerl & Snee, 2010). Systems Statistical Engineering research seeks to integrate causal Bayesian hierarchical modeling (Pearl, 2009) and cybernetic control theory within Beer's Viable System Model (S Beer, 1972; Stafford Beer, 1979, 1985) and the Complex Systems Governance framework (Keating, 2014; Keating & Katina, 2015, 2016) to produce multivariate systemic models for robust dynamic systems mission performance. (Cotter & Quigley, 2018) …

Application Of A Blockchain Enabled Model In Disaster Aids Supply Network Resilience, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The disaster area is a dynamic environment. The bottleneck in distributing the supplies may be from the damaged infrastructure or the unavailability of accurate information about the required amounts. The success of the disaster response network is based on collaboration, coordination, sovereignty, and equality in relief distribution. Therefore, a reliable dynamic communication system is required to facilitate the interactions, enhance the knowledge for the relief operation, prioritize, and coordinate the goods distribution. One of the promising innovative technologies is blockchain technology which enables transparent, secure, and real-time information exchange and automation through smart contracts. This study analyzes the application of …

Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Using Graph Theoretical Anomaly Detection And Machine Learning, Goksel Kucukkaya

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The cyber domain is a great business enabler providing many types of enterprises new opportunities such as scaling up services, obtaining customer insights, identifying end-user profiles, sharing data, and expanding to new communities. However, the cyber domain also comes with its own set of risks. Cybersecurity risk assessment helps enterprises explore these new opportunities and, at the same time, proportionately manage the risks by establishing cyber situational awareness and identifying potential consequences. Anomaly detection is a mechanism to enable situational awareness in the cyber domain. However, anomaly detection also requires one of the most extensive sets of data and features …

Specification, Control, And Applications Of Z-Source Circuit Breakers For The Protection Of Dc Power Networks, Sagar Bhatta

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

There is a highly-increasing demand for the DC power transmission and distribution in modern power systems for the integration of newly-installed renewable energy resources and storage systems to the existing utilities. Application of DC power systems in electric ships, battery energy devices, high-voltage DC networks, smart grids, electric vehicles, microgrids, and wind farms is a recent trend that is being highly investigated. The fault protection of DC systems is an essential but challenging issue that needs careful attention to maintain system operation reliability and device safety. In this research, the specification, control, and application of Z-source breakers (ZCBs) are investigated …

Complex System Governance As A Framework For Asset Management, Polinpapilinho F. Katina, James C. Pyne, Charles B. Keating, Dragan Komljenovic

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Complex system governance (CSG) is an emerging field encompassing a framework for system performance improvement through the purposeful design, execution, and evolution of essential metasystem functions. The goal of this study was to understand how the domain of asset management (AsM) can leverage the capabilities of CSG. AsM emerged from engineering as a structured approach to organizing complex organizations to realize the value of assets while balancing performance, risks, costs, and other opportunities. However, there remains a scarcity of literature discussing the potential relationship between AsM and CSG. To initiate the closure of this gap, this research reviews the basics …

The Technology Transfer Network Dynamic In The Information Technology Industry Of Yucatan, Mexico, Francisco Cima, Pilar Pazos, Ana Maria Canto

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The present paper explores the technology transfer linkages among universities, research centers, and private companies in Yucatan, Mexico's information technology industry. Social network analysis (SNA) was used as a method to identify the structural characteristics of the technology transfer collaborations, and the changes in the patterns of interactions among institutions over the years. Data were obtained from the National Council for Science and Technology repository (CONACYT). Associations formed to enhance technology advancement and innovation practices between 2010 and 2018 were analyzed in this study. Network transitivity, the patterns of triadic configurations, and heterophily were compared to uncover the evolution of …

Interactive Agent-Based Simulation For Experimentation: A Case Study With Cooperatve Game Theory, Andrew J. Collins, Sheida Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Incorporating human behavior is a current challenge for agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS). Human behavior includes many different aspects depending on the scenario considered. The scenario context of this paper is strategic coalition formation, which is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, but we use ABMS instead; as such, it needs to be validated. One approach to validation is to compare the recorded behavior of humans to what was observed in our simulation. We suggest that using an interactive simulation is a good approach to collecting the necessary human behavior data because the humans would be playing in precisely the …

Human Characteristics Impact On Strategic Decisions In A Human-In-The-Loop Simulation, Andrew J. Collins, Shieda Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, a hybrid simulation model of the agent-based model and cooperative game theory is used in a human-in-the-loop experiment to study the effect of human demographic characteristics in situations where they make strategic coalition decisions. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computational method that can reveal emergent phenomenon from interactions between agents in an environment. It has been suggested in organizational psychology that ABM could model human behavior more holistically than other modeling methods. Cooperative game theory is a method that models strategic coalitions formation. Three characteristics (age, education, and gender) were considered in the experiment to see if …

Enhancing Cyberweapon Effectiveness Methodology With Se Modeling Techniques: Both For Offense And Defense, C. Ariel Pinto, Matthew Zurasky, Fatine Elakramine, Safae El Amrani, Raed M. Jaradat, Chad Kerr, Vidanelage L. Dayarathna

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A recent cyberweapons effectiveness methodology clearly provides a parallel but distinct process from that of kinetic weapons – both for defense and offense purposes. This methodology promotes consistency and improves cyberweapon system evaluation accuracy – for both offensive and defensive postures. However, integrating this cyberweapons effectiveness methodology into the design phase and operations phase of weapons systems development is still a challenge. The paper explores several systems engineering modeling techniques (e.g., SysML) and how they can be leveraged towards an enhanced effectiveness methodology. It highlights how failure mode analyses (e.g., FMEA) can facilitate cyber damage determination and target assessment, how …

Generic Design Methodology For Smart Manufacturing Systems From A Practical Perspective, Part I—Digital Triad Concept And Its Application As A System Reference Model, Zhuming Bi, Wen-Jun Zhang, Chong Wu, Chaomin Luo, Lida Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Rapidly developed information technologies (IT) have continuously empowered manufacturing systems and accelerated the evolution of manufacturing system paradigms, and smart manufacturing (SM) has become one of the most promising paradigms. The study of SM has attracted a great deal of attention for researchers in academia and practitioners in industry. However, an obvious fact is that people with different backgrounds have different expectations for SM, and this has led to high diversity, ambiguity, and inconsistency in terms of definitions, reference models, performance matrices, and system design methodologies. It has been found that the state of the art SM research is limited …

Computational Decision Support For The Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition, Andreas Tolk, Christopher Glazner, Joseph Ungerleider

VMASC Publications

In the early months of 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus took the world by surprise, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused significant loss of lives and challenged the sustainability of our health care systems. In mid-March, it became obvious that government and communities had to react immediately. Under the lead of the Mayo Clinic and The MITRE Corporation, the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition (C19HCC) was established as a coordinated public-interest, private-sector response. The coalition brought healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups to support supply chains, inform coordinated social policies, and provide data-driven insights to protect people and preserve …

Generic Design Methodology For Smart Manufacturing Systems From A Practical Perspective. Part Ii—Systematic Designs Of Smart Manufacturing Systems, Zhuming Bi, Wen-Jun Zhang, Chong Wu, Chaomin Luo, Lida Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

In a traditional system paradigm, an enterprise reference model provides the guide for practitioners to select manufacturing elements, configure elements into a manufacturing system, and model system options for evaluation and comparison of system solutions against given performance metrics. However, a smart manufacturing system aims to reconfigure different systems in achieving high-level smartness in its system lifecycle; moreover, each smart system is customized in terms of the constraints of manufacturing resources and the prioritized performance metrics to achieve system smartness. Few works were found on the development of systematic methodologies for the design of smart manufacturing systems. The novel contributions …

Continuity Of Chen-Fliess Series For Applications In System Identification And Machine Learning, Rafael Dahmen, W. Steven Gray, Alexander Schmeding

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Model continuity plays an important role in applications like system identification, adaptive control, and machine learning. This paper provides sufficient conditions under which input-output systems represented by locally convergent Chen-Fliess series are jointly continuous with respect to their generating series and as operators mapping a ball in an Lp-space to a ball in an Lq-space, where p and q are conjugate exponents. The starting point is to introduce a class of topological vector spaces known as Silva spaces to frame the problem and then to employ the concept of a direct limit to describe convergence. The proof of the main …

An Investigation On The Effectiveness Of A Problem Structuring Method In A Group Decision-Making Process, Ying Thaviphoke

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

There is no shortage of methods to address messy problems. A messy problem is a system of problems with multiple stakeholders who may hold different views of what is feasible or desirable. Decision-makers in a messy problem are prone to committing an error – especially the Type III error. One of the ways to mitigate the chance of committing the error in a messy problem is to reach a group consensus. Problem Structuring Methods (PSM) are the collections of participatory modeling methods that aim to tackle a messy problem. Despite the positive reports, literature indicates some challenges and criticisms of …

Using Interacting Multiple Model Filters To Indicate Program Risk, Amy Sunshine Smith-Carroll

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Technology development has increased exponentially. Program managers are pushed to accelerate development. There are many resources available to program managers that enable acceleration, such as: additional resources in the form of funding, people and technology. There are also negative impacts to acceleration, such as: inclusion, inexperience program managers, and communication. This research seeks to identify the limit to which a program or project can be accelerated before the program manager begins to accept an unacceptable amount of pre-determined risk.

This research will utilize estimation algorithms used by sensor systems to estimate the current and future state of objects in space. …

Macroeconomic Aspects Of Maintenance Optimization Of Critical Infrastructures, S. A. Timashev, A. V. Bushinskaya

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The main goal of maintenance is prevention, timely detection and elimination of failures and damage. From the point of view of critical infrastructures (CIs), the main purpose of their maintenance is to increase the safety of CIs and / or to ensure life safety. CIs should be optimal in terms of their purpose, cost, as a source of income and profit at all stages of their life cycle, and also acceptable in terms of possible loss of human lives or injuries. The paper considers the assessment of necessary optimal investments in the maintenance (time interval between subsequent maintenance), to increase …

Black-Swan Type Catastrophes And Antifragility/Supra-Resilience Of Urban Socio-Technical Infrastructures, S. A, Timashev

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper may be one of the first attempts dealing with the problem of creating, providing and maintaining antifragility of systems of interdependent urban critical infrastructures (CI) in the wake of black-swan type technological, ecological, economic or social catastrophes occurring in a municipality. A synonym is offered to describe antifragility from a positive psychology perspective, formulating the problem as the supraresilience problem. A brief description is given of the developed innovative approach for creating a supraresilient city/region using black-swan catastrophe and the antifragility concepts. Resilience metrics are formulated as well as methods of assessing damage, interdependence of infrastructures and convergent …