University of Buffalo-SUNY Lewis
The University of Buffalo-SUNY (UB) is planning to join the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) entitled "Center for e-Design and Realization of Engineered Products and Systems (e-Design)" which currently is a multi- university center comprised of Virginia Tech (lead institution), the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Central Florida. The mission and vision of the existing e-Design Center is to research and develop methods tools that support the realization of a new design paradigm that can be used to develop new engineered products and systems.
UB requests funding for becoming a fourth site of the NSF Center for e-Design under the leadership of Professor Kemper E. Lewis. The research efforts at UB will support the e-Design center's long term goal of establishing a new paradigm where products/systems are conceived and produced in a cyber-enabled domain with the full participation of all key stake-holders including designers, manufacturers, engineers, OEMs and consumers. There are three areas at UB with strong technical overlap with the current research program of the existing center. The fourth thrust, motion simulation and its application to transportation, is an excellent and unique niche for this site. The innovative projects in this proposal bridge the four thrust areas and demonstrate the potential for interaction with the other university partners.
A multi-disciplinary team including six academic departments is engaged. The research will have broader impact through a strong cohort of industry partners, including medical, foods and infrastructure companies. The research thrusts identified will produce tools useful to a wide range of industries. The proposed effort at UB will contribute to the successful development and preparation of graduate and undergraduate students. Students associated with the Center will receive career development opportunities, attendance of and presentations at interdisciplinary conferences and workshops, as well as training in the ethical conduct of research. The addition of UB also contributes to the diversity of the Center, with 40% of participating faculty being women. The PI and other UB faculty will continue to recruit underrepresented students, including partnering with a number of university programs aimed at providing research opportunities for these students. The diversity efforts are leveraged by partnership with existing programs at UB, such as CSTEP, LSAMP and McNair.
This planning grant provided a foundation from which to launch the Center for e-Design at the University at Buffalo – SUNY, which we anticipate will add to the strength of this multi-university center and become a national resource with leading research that will transform and revolutionize how products and systems are designed in a collaborative, integrative, and distributed environment. The primary research contribution of our team constitutes the fundamental intellectual contributions with the core discipline of the proposed work within the center for e-Design, including the following: 1) product visualization, simulation, and virtual prototyping: the UB team will contribute to the development of advanced hardware and software tools to support design decision making using immersive visualization and simulation environments; 2) development of emerging immersive environments: The UB team will develop a number of environments that utilize tracking, virtual reality, and haptic devices for engineering design and biomedical applications; 3) enabling information infrastructures: the UB team will focus on supporting decision making in design, modeling, and simulation environments with an emphasis on configuration design, design reviews and capturing consumer feedback; and 4) motion simulation: the UB team will focus on simulating and visualizing advanced vehicle and transportation systems by developing the necessary software (simulation and visualization) and hardware (sensor networks, immersive environments). These research efforts support the e-Design Center’s long-term goal of developing intelligent e-design tools and technologies for the realization of engineered products and systems. Broader impacts of the project were immediate, as four large global companies became members of the center based on the planning meeting. Another set of companies also expressed a high level of interest based on the potential impact of the project on their product development processes. The longer term impact could include dozens of companies, hundreds of engineers, improved engineered systems, and more effective design courses.
