9634710 Fabrycky This award provides funding for fundamental research on engineering design. An underlying premise of this work is that engineering design is a decision-making process. As such, it involves decisions whose objective is to maximize value. To date, however, a measure of value has not generally been available to engineers participating in a design, and their design decisions have had to be made largely in the dark. Specifically, this research seeks to generate a measure of systems worth that can be displayed to engineers participating in a design in near real time, thus enabling them to make decisions that maximize or at least increase system worth. An important feature of this measure is that it will include life cycle factors, including environmental impacts. If successful, this research will provide both a new direction in engineering design research and considerably increased value to the engineering design process. It is becoming increasingly the consensus that engineering design is a decision-making process, and a measure of system worth, available to engineers working on a design, is a critical element of design decision making. This research holds the promise to lay a foundation that could greatly improve the quality of engineering design across all engineering products, processes and services.
