A conceptual framework for future-proofing the energy performance of buildings

This paper presents a review undertaken to understand the concept of 'future-proofing' the energy performance of buildings. The long lifecycles of the building stock, the impacts of climate change and the requirements for low carbon development underline the need for long-term thinking from the early design stages. 'Future-proofing' is an emerging research agenda with currently no widely accepted definition amongst scholars and building professionals. In this paper, it refers to design processes that accommodate explicitly full lifecycle perspectives and energy trends and drivers by at least 2050, when selecting energy efficient measures and low carbon technologies. A knowledge map is introduced, which explores the key axes (or attributes) for achieving a 'future-proofed' energy design; namely, coverage of sustainability issues, lifecycle thinking, and accommodating risks and uncertainties that affect the energy consumption. It is concluded that further research is needed so that established building energy assessment methods are refined to better incorporate future-proofing. The study follows an interdisciplinary approach and is targeted at design teams with aspirations to achieve resilient and flexible low-energy buildings over the long-term. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.

Defining product-service network configurations and location roles: A current and future state analysis framework for international engineering operations

Many manufacturing firms have developed a service dimension to their product portfolio. In response to this growing trend of servitisation, organisations, often involved in complex, long-lifecycle product-service system (PSS) provision, need to reconfigure their global engineering networks to support integrated PSS offerings. Drawing on parallel concepts in 'production' networks, the idea of 'location role' now becomes increasingly complex, in terms of service delivery. As new markets develop, locations in a specific region may need to grow/adapt engineering service 'competencies' along the value chain, from design and build to support and service, in order to serve future location-specific requirements and, potentially, those requirements of the overall network. The purpose of this paper is to advance understanding of how best to design complex multi-organisational engineering service networks, through extension of the 'production' network location role concept to a PSS context, capturing both traditional engineering 'design and build' and engineering 'service' requirements. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Measuring design investment in firms: Conceptual foundations and exploratory UK survey

The importance of design to company and national performance has been widely discussed, with a number of studies investigating the value or impact of design on performance. However, none of these studies has measured design investment as an input against which performance can be compared. As yet, there is no established way in which design investment might be measured. Without such a method, we cannot develop a reliable picture, akin to that for R&D spending, on the impact of design spending on company performance. This paper presents a conceptual framework for the measurement of design investment and applies this framework in a survey of UK firms. The framework describes design as being part of the creation and commercialization of new products and services. The survey highlights some surprising patterns of design spend in the reported sample and demonstrates the viability of the underpinning framework. A revised framework is proposed that situates design investment in the context of R&D. The model has implications for policy makers trying to understand the role and scale of design in the private sector, for managers wishing to optimize their design investments and for academics seeking to measure the value of design. © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.

A Bayesian framework to predict deformations during supported excavations based on a semi-empirical method

The ground movements induced by the construction of supported excavation systems are generally predicted by empirical/semi-empirical methods in the design stage. However, these methods cannot account for the site-specific conditions and for information that becomes available as an excavation proceeds. A Bayesian updating methodology is proposed to update the predictions of ground movements in the later stages of excavation based on recorded deformation measurements. As an application, the proposed framework is used to predict the three-dimensional deformation shapes at four incremental excavation stages of an actual supported excavation project. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, London.

A Bayesian framework to predict deformations during supported excavations based on a semi-empirical method

The ground movements induced by the construction of supported excavation systems are generally predicted in the design stage by empirical/semi-empirical methods. However, these methods cannot account for the site-specific conditions and for information that become available as an excavation proceeds. A Bayesian updating methodology is proposed to update the predictions of ground movements in the later stages of excavation based on recorded deformation measurements. As an application, the proposed framework is used to predict the three-dimensional deformation shapes at four incremental excavation stages of an actual supported excavation project. Copyright © ASCE 2011.

Coordinated motion design on lie groups

The present paper proposes a unified geometric framework for coordinated motion on Lie groups. It first gives a general problem formulation and analyzes ensuing conditions for coordinated motion. Then, it introduces a precise method to design control laws in fully actuated and underactuated settings with simple integrator dynamics. It thereby shows that coordination can be studied in a systematic way once the Lie group geometry of the configuration space is well characterized. Applying the proposed general methodology to particular examples allows to retrieve control laws that have been proposed in the literature on intuitive grounds. A link with Brockett's double bracket flows is also made. The concepts are illustrated on SO(3), SE(2) and SE(3). © 2010 IEEE.

Differential geometry and design coupling in MDO

The notion of coupling within a design, particularly within the context of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO), is much used but ill-defined. There are many different ways of measuring design coupling, but these measures vary in both their conceptions of what design coupling is and how such coupling may be calculated. Within the differential geometry framework which we have previously developed for MDO systems, we put forth our own design coupling metric for consideration. Our metric is not commensurate with similar types of coupling metrics, but we show that it both provides a helpful geo- metric interpretation of coupling (and uncoupledness in particular) and exhibits greater generality and potential for analysis than those similar metrics. Furthermore, we discuss how the metric might be profitably extended to time-varying problems and show how the metric's measure of coupling can be applied to multi-objective optimization problems (in unconstrained optimization and in MDO). © 2013 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.

Enhancing and developing the practical optimisation capabilities and intelligence of automatic design software

In the modern engineering design cycle the use of computational tools becomes a neces- sity. The complexity of the engineering systems under consideration for design increases dramatically as the demands for advanced and innovative design concepts and engineering products is expanding. At the same time the advancements in the available technology in terms of computational resources and power, as well as the intelligence of the design software, accommodate these demands and make them a viable approach towards the chal- lenge of real-world engineering problems. This class of design optimisation problems is by nature multi-disciplinary. In the present work we establish enhanced optimisation capabil- ities within the Nimrod/O tool for massively distributed execution of computational tasks through cluster and computational grid resources, and develop the potential to combine and benefit from all the possible available technological advancements, both software and hardware. We develop the interface between a Free Form Deformation geometry manage- ment in-house code with the 2D airfoil aerodynamic efficiency evaluation tool XFoil, and the well established multi-objective heuristic optimisation algorithm NSGA-II. A simple airfoil design problem has been defined to demonstrate the functionality of the design sys- tem, but also to accommodate a framework for future developments and testing with other state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms such as the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) and the Multi-Objective Tabu Search (MOTS) techniques. Ultimately, heav- ily computationally expensive industrial design cases can be realised within the presented framework that could not be investigated before. © 2012 by the authors. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Enhancing and developing the practical optimisation capabilities and intelligence of automatic design software

In the modern engineering design cycle the use of computational tools becomes a necessity. The complexity of the engineering systems under consideration for design increases dramatically as the demands for advanced and innovative design concepts and engineering products is expanding. At the same time the advancements in the available technology in terms of computational resources and power, as well as the intelligence of the design software, accommodate these demands and make them a viable approach towards the challenge of real-world engineering problems. This class of design optimisation problems is by nature multi-disciplinary. In the present work we establish enhanced optimisation capabilities within the Nimrod/O tool for massively distributed execution of computational tasks through cluster and computational grid resources, and develop the potential to combine and benefit from all the possible available technological advancements, both software and hardware. We develop the interface between a Free Form Deformation geometry management in-house code with the 2D airfoil aerodynamic efficiency evaluation tool XFoil, and the well established multi-objective heuristic optimisation algorithm NSGA-II. A simple airfoil design problem has been defined to demonstrate the functionality of the design system, but also to accommodate a framework for future developments and testing with other state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms such as the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) and the Multi-Objective Tabu Search (MOTS) techniques. Ultimately, heavily computationally expensive industrial design cases can be realised within the presented framework that could not be investigated before. ©2012 AIAA.

Tomorrow's cities: a framework to assess urban resilience

Urbanisation is one of the great driving forces of the twenty-first century. Cities generate both productivity and creativity, and the benefits offered by high-density living and working contribute to sustainability. Cities comprise multiple components, forming both static and dynamic systems that are interconnected directly and indirectly on a number of levels. Bringing together large numbers of people within a complex system can lead to vulnerability from a wide range of hazards, threats and trends. The key to reducing this vulnerability is the identification of critical systems and determination of the implications of their failure and their interconnectivities with other systems. One emerging approach to these challenges focuses on building resilience – defined here as the degree to which a system can continue to function effectively in a changing environment. This paper puts forward a framework designed to help engineers, planners and designers to support cities in understanding the hazards, threats and trends that can make them vulnerable, and identify focus areas for building resilience into the systems, which allow it to function and prosper. Four case studies of cities whose resilience was tested by recent extreme weather events are presented, seeking to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework.

Comparison of ilities for protection against uncertainty in system design

The concepts of reliability, robustness, adaptability, versatility, resilience and flexibility have been used to describe how a system design can mitigate the likely impact of uncertainties without removing their sources. With the increasing number of publications on designing systems to have such ilities, there is a need to clarify the relationships between the different ideas. This short article introduces a framework to compare these different ways in which a system can be insensitive to uncertainty, clarifying their meaning in the context of complex system design. We focus on relationships between the ilities listed above and do not discuss in detail methods to design-for-ilities. © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.

Self-organization, embodiment, and biologically inspired robotics.

Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired (bio-inspired) robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, versatility, and agility.

Integrating design attributes, knowledge and uncertainty in aerospace sector

The delivery of integrated product and service solutions is growing in the aerospace industry, driven by the potential of increasing profits. Such solutions require a life cycle view at the design phase in order to support the delivery of the equipment. The influence of uncertainty associated with design for services is increasingly a challenge due to information and knowledge constraints. There is a lack of frameworks that aim to define and quantify relationship between information and knowledge with uncertainty. Driven by this gap, the paper presents a framework to illustrate the link between uncertainty and knowledge within the design context for services in the aerospace industry. The paper combines industrial interaction and literature review to initially define the design attributes, the associated knowledge requirements and the uncertainties experienced. The framework is then applied in three cases through development of causal loop models (CLMs), which are validated by industrial and academic experts. The concepts and inter-linkages are developed with the intention of developing a software prototype. Future recommendations are also included. © 2014 CIRP.

Robotics education: A case study in soft-bodied locomotion

Locomotion has been one of the frequently used case studies in hands-on curricula in robotics education. Students are usually instructed to construct their own wheeled or legged robots from modular robot kits. In the development process of a robot students tend to emphasize on the programming part and consequently, neglect the design of the robot's body. However, the morphology of a robot (i.e. its body shape and material properties) plays an important role especially in dynamic tasks such as locomotion. In this paper we introduce a case study of a tutorial on soft-robotics where students were encouraged to focus solely on the morphology of a robot to achieve stable and fast locomotion. The students should experience the influence material properties exert on the performance of a robot and consequently, extract design principles. This tutorial was held in the context of the 2012 Summer School on Soft Robotics at ETH Zurich, which was one of the world's first courses specialized in the emerging field. We describe the tutorial set-up, the used hardware and software, the students assessment criteria as well as the results. Based on the high creativity and diversity of the robots built by the students, we conclude that the concept of this tutorial has great potentials for both education and research. © 2013 IEEE.

Soft robotics: The next generation of intelligent machines

There has been an increasing interest in applying biological principles to the design and control of robots. Unlike industrial robots that are programmed to execute a rather limited number of tasks, the new generation of bio-inspired robots is expected to display a wide range of behaviours in unpredictable environments, as well as to interact safely and smoothly with human co-workers. In this article, we put forward some of the properties that will characterize these new robots: soft materials, flexible and stretchable sensors, modular and efficient actuators, self-organization and distributed control. We introduce a number of design principles; in particular, we try to comprehend the novel design space that now includes soft materials and requires a completely different way of thinking about control. We also introduce a recent case study of developing a complex humanoid robot, discuss the lessons learned and speculate about future challenges and perspectives.