Daniel A. Mcadams

• Texas A&M University

A graph theoretic approach for quantitatively comparing digital twin designs is explored in this paper, with a novel methodology being offered to evaluate the structural and functional similarities between these complex systems. Graph theory is leveraged to represent digital twins as mathematical graphs in our approach, with nodes represented by fu...

This study explores how large language models like ChatGPT comprehend language and assess information. Through two experiments, we compare ChatGPT's performance with humans', addressing two key questions: 1) How does ChatGPT compare with human raters in evaluating judgment-based tasks like speculative technology realization? 2) How well does ChatGP...

The increasing student enrollment in engineering and the growing importance of written communication motivate us to implement automated evaluation of written technical documents. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the automatic grading of written assignments in engineering and provides insights into effectively evaluating technical com...

This article illustrates an approach to developing design heuristics for digital twins (DTs). DTs are virtual replicas of physical systems or objects. Heuristics are rules of thumb used to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making. Heuristics can be used in DT design to simplify the complex design process and guide designers through creating a...

This article presents and illustrates a functional modeling-based representation of digital twinning (DT) architectures. We provide a detailed review of the existing architectures and frameworks intended for use on product digital twins. We identified gaps in the prior work on architectures and frameworks for DT of products, product families, and s...

This work analyzes the role of bioinspired product architecture in facilitating the development of robust engineering systems. Existing studies on bioinspired product architecture largely focus on inspiring biology-like function-sharing in engineering design. This work shows that the guidelines for bioinspired product architecture, originally devel...

In this article, we explore the capability of speculative fiction to predict future realized technologies. We review a large set of speculative technologies introduced in speculative fiction to determine if the technologies were subsequently realized. Additionally, we explore the time between the speculated introduction and actual realization. Our...

In this work, we show that bioinspired function-sharing can be effectively applied in engineering design by abstracting and emulating the product architecture of biological systems that exhibit function-sharing. Systems that leverage function-sharing enable multiple functions to be performed by a single structure. Billions of years of evolution has...

In this work, we deduce principles of bioinspired product architecture to effectively leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. Function-sharing enables a single structure to perform multiple functions and can improve the performance characteristics of a system. Billions of years of evolution have led to the emergence of function-...

In this work, we deduce principles of bioinspired product architectures to leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. Function-sharing allows multiple functions to be performed by a single structure and can lead to improvements in cost, weight and other performance characteristics. Billions of years of evolution has led to the emer...

Numerous folding patterns, structures, and behaviors exist in nature that may provide design solutions to engineering problems. While applying biological solutions to engineering design is evidently valuable, the retrieval of useful design inspiration remains a primary challenge preventing the transfer of knowledge from biology to the engineering d...

This database currently includes more than 100,000 data points that belong to 31 technical performance metric categories of 7 engineering systems (i.e., passenger aircraft, orbital launch system, automobile, computer, refrigerator, lamp, and direct-fire ground weapon systems) and their components. The "others" folder includes three extra data sets...

Research in engineering system evolution studies the technical performance (e.g., speed, capacity, and energy efficiency) and the functional and architectural changes of engineering systems (e.g., automobiles, aircrafts, laptops and smartphones) over time. The research results of engineering system evolution help designers, R&D managers, investors,...

The development of multi-functional designs is one of the prime reasons to adopt bio-inspired design in engineering design. However, the development of multi-functional bio-inspired designs is mostly solution-driven, in the sense that an available multi-functional solution drives the search for a problem that can be solved by implementing the avail...

Technology evolution describes a change in a technology performance over time. The modeling of technology evolution is crucial for designers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to set reasonable R&D targets, invest in promising technology, and develop effective incentive policies. Scientists and engineers have developed several mathematical fu...

Technology evolution describes a change in a technology performance over time. The modeling of technology evolution is crucial for designers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to set reasonable R&D targets, invest in promising technology, and develop effective incentive policies. Scientists and engineers have developed several mathematical fu...

Research in engineering system evolution studies the technical performance (e.g., speed, capacity, and energy efficiency) and the functional and architectural changes of engineering systems (e.g., automobiles, aircrafts, laptops and smartphones) over time. The research results of engineering system evolution help designers, R&D managers, investors,...

Nacre is an inner layer of seashells that has a remarkable combination of stiffness, strength, and toughness. Engineers are inspired to mimic it to create engineering composites with properties not available in current materials. Toward designing and realizing a bioinspired nacre, a search for some best combination of tablets material, matrix mater...

Through billions of years of evolution, a latent record of successful and failed design practices has developed in nature. The endeavors to exploit this record have resulted in numerous successful products in various fields of engineering, including, but not limited to, networking, propulsion, surface engineering, and robotics. In this work, a stud...

System evolution prediction is critical for designers to make R&D and outsourcing decisions. Many descriptive models are used for this purpose, but they have several limitations. In this paper, we extend the Lotka–Volterra equations as an ecosystem model to predict the performances of the system and its components. This model comprises a set of dif...

Technology evolution prediction is critical for designers, business managers, and entrepreneurs to make important decisions during product development planning such as R&D investment and outsourcing. In practice, designers want to supplement point forecasts with prediction intervals to assess future uncertainty and make contingency plans accordingl...

Product family design offers a cost-effective solution for providing a variety of products to meet the needs of diverse markets. At the beginning of product family design, designers must decide what can be shared among the product variants in a family. Optimal design formulations have been developed by researchers to find one optimal component shar...

Technology evolution prediction, or technological forecasting, is critical for designers to make important decisions during product development planning such as R&D investment and outsourcing. In practice, designers want to supplement point forecast by prediction intervals to assess future uncertainty and make contingency plans. Available technolog...

The structure of pomelo peel arouses research interest in recent years because of the outstanding damping and energy dissipating performance of the pomelo peel. Researchers found that pomelo peel has varying pore size through the peel thickness; the pore size gradient is one of key reasons leading to superior energy dissipation performance of pomel...

During the development planning of a new product, designers and entrepreneurs rely on the prediction of product performance to make business investment and design strategy decisions. Moore’s law and the logistic S-curve model help make such predictions but suffer several drawbacks. In this paper, Lotka–Volterra equations are used to describe the in...

Origami is a traditional art form that realizes three-dimensional shapes by folding paper sheets. Origami designers use mathematical theorems to support their design efforts. These theorems require a condition of a flat fold on folded sheets. When working with paper, the paper is essentially zero thickness and folds flat. Thus, to access the power...

Hard biological materials such as nacre, bone, and teeth exhibit high values of toughness although it is meanly made of a ceramic material. Ceramic materials are brittle and fail in a catastrophic manner therefore they have low values of toughness. Researchers have been curious in examining the reasons behind such performance. It has been found tha...

Graph grammars, a technique for formulating new graphs based on a set of rules, is a very powerful tool for computational design synthesis. It is particularly suitable for discrete categorical data where principal component analysis is generally not applicable. Furthermore, this technique utilizes three different programs in conjunction with a desi...

During the development planning of a new product, designers rely on the prediction of the product performance to make business investments and frame design strategy. The S-curve model is commonly used for this purpose, but it has several drawbacks. A significant volume of product performance data doesn’t fit well with an S-curve. An S-curve model i...

ion of biological folding mechanisms can lead to the development of novel foldable solutions for engineering problems. Examples of biological structures that are analogous to foldable engineering solutions are discussed and serve as inspiration for this research effort. Numerous folding mechanisms exist in nature and have not been considered for en...

The interaction between technologies critically determines technology evolution. Commensalism and amensalism are two common relationships between component and system technologies but have attracted scant research attention. In both the relationships, the component technology performance is unaffected by the system technology performance. However,...

Nacre is a tough yet stiff natural composite composed of microscopic mineral polygonal tablets bonded by a tough biopolymer. The high stiffness of nacre is known to be due to its high mineral content. However, the remarkable toughness of nacre is explained by its ability to deform past a yield point and develop large inelastic strain over a large v...

A function-based keyword search is a concept generation methodology studied in the bioinspired design area that conveys textual biological inspiration for engineering design. Current keyword search methods are inefficient primarily due to the knowledge gap between engineering and biology domains. To improve current keyword search methods, we propos...

Engineering design informatics - Volume 30 Issue 4 - Chris McMahon, Ying Liu, Daniel McAdams

Natural materials are able to achieve a wide range and combination of properties through the arrangement of the material’s components. These biological materials are often more effective and better suited to their function than engineered materials, even with the use of a limited set of components. By mimicking a biological material’s component arr...

Origami transforms a 2-dimensional sheet to a 3-dimensional structure through the act of folding paper. The principles of this ancient art form have inspired various products and emerging technologies engineered for applications far beyond art and aesthetic. Origami structures feature many useful characteristics pertinent to modern day design chall...

Through billions of years of evolution, biological systems have achieved advantageous unification between structure and properties. A review of the nano-/micromanufacturing of bioinspired hybrid materials is presented by J. C. Grunlan and co-workers on page 6292. The cover image shows a live gecko alongside a textured glove inspired by the incredib...

Through billions of years of evolution and natural selection, biological systems have developed strategies to achieve advantageous unification between structure and bulk properties. The discovery of these fascinating properties and phenomena has triggered increasing interest in identifying characteristics of biological materials, through modern cha...

Bioinspired design is becoming an increasingly popular approach which makes use of nature as a source of inspiration to develop engineering, architectural and other designs. Tools and methods are currently being analyzed and tested to determine how designers may best leverage biological systems to generate designs. In this paper we present a study...

Much design theory research seeks to create, evaluate, improve or optimize design methods. Whether that research focuses on design thinking, tools, methods, or education, short design problems are often provided to participants in order to evaluate the effects of the variables being tested. When designing and creating such problems, certain charact...

AI EDAM Special Issue, November 2016, Vol. 30, No. 4 - Volume 29 Issue 3 - Daniel McAdams, Chris McMahon, Ying Liu

As the advantages of foldable or deployable structures are being discovered, research into origami engineering has attracted more focus from both artists and engineers. With the aid of modern computer techniques, some computational origami design methods have been developed. Most of these methods focus on the problem of origami crease pattern desig...

Analogy and bioinspired design have demonstrated applicability as effective tools for innovation, but they can be very difficult to implement. One challenge faced by students and other novice designers is their lack of knowledge to base analogies on. This challenge is also faced by engineers making distant-domain analogies to biology. Other open re...

Bioinspired design uses nature as a source of inspiration for creating solutions to engineering design problems. Nature evolves time-tested, efficient designs that may offer an innovative solution. However, it appears that one of the main obstacles to bioinspired design is the engineers’ lack of biological knowledge, which causes difficulty in iden...

Bioinspired design is the adaptation of methods, strategies, or principles found in nature to solve engineering problems. One formalized approach to bioinspired solution seeking is the abstraction of the engineering problem into a functional need and then seeking solutions to this function using a keyword type search method on text based biological...

The optimal length and format for concept generation is largely unknown. One experiment compares a 50-min session to a 2-h session, observing that senior undergraduates generate more ideas and a greater variety of solutions with additional time, although high novelty solutions are developed within the first 50 min. A second study finds that more no...

As advantages of foldable or deployable structures have been established, origami artists and engineers have started to study the engineering applications of origami structures. Methods of computational origami design that serve different types of origami have already been developed. However, most of the existing design methods focus on automatical...

Natural materials are often more efficient and tend to have a wider range and combination of properties than do present-day engineered materials. Biological materials are composed from a limited set of components, but are able to achieve great diversity in their properties. The variation in properties is largely due to the different arrangements of...

A "big picture" approach to a systematic, function-based biologically-inspired design is presented in this chapter. The approach supports two different starting, or perhaps motivating, points: a customer need motivated product design or a biological system motivated product opportunity. Both approaches rely on a designer's ability to create a funct...

Bioinspired design, the practice of looking to nature to find inspiration for solutions to engineering problems, is increasingly a desired approach to design. It allows designers to tap a wealth of time-tested solutions to difficult problems in a domain less considered by designers. Only recently have researchers developed organized, systematic met...

Bio-inspired design (BID) is an emerging research area in design, biology, computing, and engineering that seeks to systematically mine biological knowledge to solve design problems. To promote BID research, and especially research on computer-aided BID, the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) recently sponsored two workshops. These wor...

From simple cases such as hook and latch attachments found in Velcro to articulated-wing flying vehicles, biology often has been used to inspire many creative design ideas. The scientific challenge now is to transform the paradigm into a repeatable and scalable methodology. Biologically Inspired Design explores computational techniques and tools th...

Engineering design heuristics offer the potential to improve the design process and resultant designs. Currently, heuristics are empirically derived by experts. The goal of this paper is to automate the heuristics generation process. Functional modeling, a well-established product representation framework, is applied in this research to abstract th...

Inclusive products intend to equally serve people with and without a disability. This paper focuses on creating guidelines that are applicable during the early stages of designing inclusive products. Actionfunction diagrams are used to formally compare existing inclusive products to their typical counterparts to study the design similarities and di...

Identifying applicable biological systems for engineering design remains a persistent challenge for bioinspired design. Previous researchers have proposed an Engineering-to-Biology thesaurus that allows designers to identify biological keywords that are functionally similar to terms in the Functional Basis. This work presents an experimental examin...

Inclusive design aims to provide equitable use of a product irrespective of the user’s ability. Currently, sufficient tools are not available for practicing inclusive design. Recent research efforts have developed a method for inclusive design during the conceptual phase; the method consists of applying an empirically derived set of inclusive desig...

Origami is a traditional Asian fine art of creating three-dimensional structures by folding paper. Recently, engineers have started to exploit the functional advantages of foldable structures. Formal representations of origami structures are limited. Most of the origami research describes an origami structure by providing the geometric properties o...

Self-efficacy, a person's belief about their own ability for a particular skill, has been shown to be highly correlated with an individual's accomplishment level. With high self-efficacy, a student will use more cognitive and metacognitive strategies and be more likely to select challenging tasks due to their self-confidence. Upon encountering a pr...

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers' specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design...

The potential for engineering technology to evolve over time can be a critical consideration in design decisions that involve long-term commitments. Investments in manufacturing equipment, contractual relationships, and other factors can make it difficult for engineering firms to backtrack once they have chosen one technology over others. Although...

Bioinspired design, the practice of looking to nature to find inspiration for engineering design, is becoming an increasingly desired approach to design. It allows designers to tap a wealth of time-tested solutions to difficult problems in a domain rarely considered by designers. Only recently have researchers developed organized, systematic method...

Design is an uncertain human activity involving decisions with uncertain outcomes. Sources of uncertainty in product design include uncertainty in modeling methods, market preferences, and performance levels of subsystem technologies, among many others. The performance of a technology evolves over time, typically exhibiting improving performance. A...

This paper focuses on creating guidelines for the design of products for persons with disabilities that are applicable during early stages of design. The research uses the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health to formally describe user activity, the Functional Basis to describe product function, and the actionfunction d...

A major decision to make in design projects is the selection of the best technology to provide some needed system functionality. In making this decision, the designer must consider the range of technologies available and the performance of each. During the useful life of the product, the technologies composing the product evolve as research and dev...

Universal design is a concept intended to promote the development of products and environments equally usable by all the users, benefits of which are well established. Earlier efforts to provide guidelines for universal design have not adequately supported industry requisites. This paper focuses on creating early stage applicable design guidelines...

Bioinspired design, the practice of using biological organisms and systems to inspire the design of engineering systems, has traditionally been performed without the use of systematic tools or methods to aid the designer. In recent years however, several tools have been developed to help designers effectively use bioinspiration for engineering desi...

Using mathematical behaviour models to determine system performance is crucial to the design of complex systems. Nevertheless, during the early stages of design, it is often difficult to create behavioural models as component solutions have not been fully identified. What is known is information about the desired functionality of the system is know...

This paper outlines a function-based method for generating and utilising design parameter sensitivity knowledge for use during the conceptual design phase of an engineering system. Of particular interest is an understanding of sensitivity across a range of parameter values instead of only at a single nominal point. To do this, functional models cre...

In an attempt to reduce product design time, engineers are currently exploring alternative ways to design and engineer their products. In the next century, tools that are able to capture general knowledge about the design process will replace the CAD tools currently used in engineering design. These new tools will capture not only a geometric repre...

In a time when engineering education seems to focus more and more on virtual analysis, we report on a counter-culture return to the roots of engineering: providing students the opportunity to experience the physics and engineering principles that instructors are pushing around on the chalkboard. This article presents a new approach to teaching comm...

This paper presents a product analysis framework for improving research and practice in universal design-a term commonly used to describe goods and services that are usable both by persons with a disability and by typical users. Seventeen percent of the U.S. population has some form of a disability. Nevertheless, many companies are unfamiliar with...

Abstractions perform a fundamental role during product design, freeing a problem from reality into a representation more readily represented with engineering principles. Functional modelling provides such a representation for product design where customer needs are translated into a representation of elementary operations defining what a product mu...

Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not alwa...

In recent years, numerous methods to aid designers in conceptualizing new products have been developed. These methods intend to give structure to a process that was, at one time, considered to be a purely creative exercise. Resulting from the study, implementation, and refinement of design methodologies is the notion that both the structure of the...

Biomimetic design, the use of nature to inspire solutions to engineering problems, has been practiced on an ad hoc basis throughout human history. Only recently, however, have researchers sought to develop formal tools and principles to effectively tap the wealth of design solutions found within nature. Texas A&M University is developing an undergr...

Bioinspired design, the use of nature to inspire solutions to engineering problems, is a powerful approach for innovation but is generally practiced on an ad hoc basis. Only recently, however, have researchers sought to develop formal tools and principles to effectively tap the wealth of design solutions found within nature. Research efforts in app...

This paper documents two studies in distributed idea generation at Texas A&M. The first study is a controlled two-factor experiment wherein three-person groups of mechanical engineering capstone design students generate solutions to a simple design problem using either brainstorming or a modified 635 method in either a distributed or collocated tea...

The natural world provides numerous cases for inspiration in engineering design. Biological organisms, phenomena, and strategies, which we refer to as biological systems, provide a rich set of analogies. These systems provide insight into sustainable and adaptable design and offer engineers billions of years of valuable experience, which can be use...

An engineering design framework for an autonomous ground vehicle vision system is discussed. We present both the conceptual and physical design by following the design process, development and testing of an intelligent ground vehicle vision system constructed for the 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. During conceptual design, the require...

One of the innovation's fundamental mechanisms, designer creativity, is both unsupported by rigorous information-technology-enabled tools and uncharacterized as a scientific phenomenon. In this paper, we present VISUALIZEIT—a project seeking to identify a scien-tific basis and develop the supporting cyberinfrastructure needed to facilitate, evaluat...

In this article, a mathematical framework to automatically evaluate the manufacturability of injection-molded and die-cast parts is presented. The framework includes an implemented mathematical algorithm to solve key outstanding challenges in feature recognition for manufacturability analysis of injection-molded and die-cast parts. A novel feature...

Functional representation of a biological system as described in Section 4, results in a description of the biological system's functionality at a specified biological category and scale. By viewing the biological system from an engineering perspective and breaking it down into manageable parts, a designer can identify parallels between the enginee...

In this paper, we extend concepts from product family and platform design and mass customisation to create a method for a universal product family design. The objective of this paper is to develop a universal design method to generate an economically feasible design concept and evaluate the design feasibility with respect to disabilities within a p...

Formula Hybrid is a collegiate design competition sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The competition is a spin-off of the Formula SAE series and requires that students design, build and race an electric-internal combustion engine hybrid automobile. To assist the design process of Texas A&M's first Formula Hybrid entry, formal functio...

Engineering design is considered a creative field that involves many activities with the end goal of a new product that fulfills a purpose. Utilization of systematic methods or tools that aid in the design process is recognized as standard practice in industry and academia. The tools are used for a number of design activities (i.e., idea generation...

Strategic adaptability is essential in capitalizing on future investment opportunities and responding properly to market trends in an uncertain environment. Customized products or services are an important source of revenue for many companies, particularly those working with in a mass customization environment where customer satisfaction is of para...

The natural world provides numerous cases for analogy and inspiration in engineering design. Biological organisms, phenomena and strategies, herein referred to as biological systems, are, in essence, living engineered systems. These living systems provide insight into sustainable and adaptable design and offer engineers billions of years of valuabl...

Improved complex system design methods can lead to innovative, efficient, and robust product designs. This research aims at improving the design of products that compose a portion of, or exist within, a complex system. Before attempting to improve product designs, one requires a better understanding and characterization of complex systems. One meth...

One in every seven Americans has some form of disability. The number of people with disabilities is expected to increase, perhaps significantly, over the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, persons with a disability remain underserved by consumer products. Product designers fail to design universal products primarily due to a lack of knowledge, tools...

This paper discusses research on fault propagation analysis and two associated fault sensitivity measurement approaches for the investigation of faults in human-centric processes. The techniques presented grew out of a joint project between the U.S. Air Force Academy and Missouri University of Science and Technology to investigate terrorist activit...

In an ideal design process, designers envision a configuration of components prior to determining dimensions or sizes of these components. Given the breadth of suppliers and production methods that exist today, most engineered artifacts are a mix of both custom-made parts and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts. The design of any future art...

In this paper we present our findings on the development of a taxonomy for electromechanical components. In building this taxonomy, we have two main objectives: First, we strive to establish a framework for future computational tools that archive, search, or reuse component knowledge during the conceptual phase of design. Second, we aim to define a...