Eswaran Subrahmanian

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Institute for Complex Engineered Systems and Engineering and Public policy

Category theory (CT) is a branch of mathematics concerned with the representation and composition of structured relationships. Recent interest in systems engineering (SE) stems from the possibility that CT might provide a principled mathematical foundation that SE currently lacks. The case is bolstered by a broad array of applications in probabilit...

This viewpoint article discusses the challenges in achieving sustainability transitions from the perspective of theories of design and of technology. It first introduces the environmental issues that face industrial civilisation, noting the differences in viewpoint concerning whether planetary limits are largely insurmountable or may be alleviated...

We investigate different systems for extracting mathematical entities from English texts in the mathematical field of category theory as a first step for constructing a mathematical knowledge graph. We consider four different term extractors and compare their results. This small experiment showcases some of the issues with the construction and eval...

The diversity of design research studies and their associated methods and reporting style make it difficult for the design research community of practice to leverage its work into further advancing the field. We illustrate how a structured multilevel analysis of diverse studies creates a canonical model that allows for the transfer of insight betwe...

Engineering safe and secure cyberphysical systems requires system engineers to develop and maintain a number of model views, both dynamic and static. Verifying the composition of requirement, behavioral, and architectural models using category theory gives rise to a strictly compositional interpretation of cyberphysical systems theory.

Seeking a more selective approach to technology usage.

Design research as a field has been studied from diverse perspectives starting from product inception to their disposal. The product of these studies includes knowledge, tools, methods, processes, frameworks, approaches, and theories. The contexts of these studies are innumerable. The unit of these studies varies from individuals to organizations,...

As the complexity and heterogeneity of a system grows, the challenge of specifying, documenting and synthesizing correct, machine-readable designs increases dramatically. Separation of the system into manageable parts is needed to support analysis at various levels of granularity so that the system is maintainable and adaptable over its life cycle....

Engineering safe and secure cyber-physical systems requires system engineers to develop and maintain a number of model views, both dynamic and static, which can be seen as algebras. We posit that verifying the composition of requirement, behavioral, and architectural models using category theory gives rise to a strictly compositional interpretation...

We introduce the notion of generic design from a new perspective, though the term does have a history in fields like systems science and along somewhat different paths in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and software engineering. For the latter, it was hypothesized as a unique type of thinking with similarities among design activities in...

As the complexity and heterogeneity of a system grows, the challenge of specifying, documenting and synthesizing correct, machine readable designs increases dramatically. Separation of the system into manageable parts is needed to support analysis at various levels of granularity so that the system is maintainable and adaptable over its life cycle....

Ce dialogue est l’illustration de ce que la force de chacun peut se transformer en un mouvement collectif. L’important, est que ce collectif abandonne la force violente, mais la défasse et la déconstruise en séries d’intentions qui se conjuguent, s’inscrivent dans le dialogue et se synthétise dans leur implémentation. Pour cela, il y faut le non-sa...

From design to power, a transduction

The Internet, which has spanned several networks in a broad range of domains, is having a significant impact on every aspect of our lives. The next generation of networks will utilize a wide variety of resources with significant sensing capabilities. Such networks will extend beyond physically linked computers to include multimodal-information from...

The problem of integrating multiple overlapping models and data is pervasive in engineering, though often implicit. We consider this issue of model management in the context of the electrical power grid as it transitions towards a modern 'Smart Grid.' We present a methodology for specifying, managing, and reasoning within multiple models of distrib...

This paper applies operads and functorial semantics to address the problem of failure diagnosis in complex systems. We start with a concrete example, developing a hierarchical interaction model for the Length Scale Interferometer, a high-precision measurement system operated by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. The model is exp...

This short paper describes a web resource—the NIST CORD-19 Web Resource—for community explorations of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). The tools for exploration in the web resource make use of the NIST-developed Root- and Rule-based method, which exploits underlying linguistic structures to create terms that represent phrases in a corp...

Problem space, social space, institutional space (PSI) is a framework and a theory of design for modeling design contexts, whose roots are in the reflection on our projects and studies over last decades; it took shape in the last seven years and has been evaluated extensively. This article traces the drivers for its development into a framework tha...

TRiad Design, intention Power. Dialog: no intention whithout power

Process plans provide a structure for 1) identifying the tasks involved in a given process, 2) the resources needed to accomplish them, and 3) a variety of relationships and constraints between these. This information guides important operational decisions across various organizational levels, from the factory floor to the global supply chain. Effi...

In this paper we use formal tools from category theory to develop a foundation for creating and managing models in systems where knowledge is distributed across multiple representations and formats. We define a class of models which incorporate three different representations---computations, logical semantics, and data--as well as model mappings (f...

Design pervades our world in variety and complexity that is difficult to grasp. Different disciplines and researchers take one or few perspectives to study, model, and try to understand design, why it fails and when it succeeds. However, without a comprehensive model, the value of such approaches is limited. We created a framework – the PSI (Proble...

In this chapter we argue for the use of representations from category theory to support better models for complex systems, and provide an example of such an application might look like. Our approach rests on the well known observation that complex system design is a fundamentally recursive discipline, which are formalized in computer science using...

Our view is not to see engineering from the point of view of philosophy, nor is it to see philosophy from the point of view of engineering. We are offering neither a philosophy of engineering, nor a re-engineering of philosophy, nor a philosophy from an evolutionary point of view, nor do we see engineering as applied science. Moreover our focus is...

Design house for non-standard scientific practice and theory

In recent years, the works on design theory (and particularly the works of the design theory SIG of the design society) have contributed to reconstruct the science of design, comparable in its structure, foundations and impact to decision theory, optimization or game theory in their time. These works have reconstructed historical roots and the evol...

In this paper, we argue that category theory (CT), the mathematical theory of abstract processes, could provide a concrete formal foundation for the study and practice of systems engineering. To provide some evidence for this claim, we trace the classic V-model of systems engineering, stopping along the way to (a) introduce elements of CT and (b) s...

This open access book examines how the social sciences can be integrated into the praxis of engineering and science, presenting unique perspectives on the interplay between engineering and social science. Motivated by the report by the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, which emphasizes th...

Motivated by the need for flexible, intuitive, reusable, and normalized terminology for guiding search and building ontologies, we present a general approach for generating sets of such terminologies from natural language documents. The terms that this approach generates are root- and rule-based terms, generated by a series of rules designed to be...

All cities can be seen as a collection of commons. Commons are spaces, services and resources shared by the citizenry. Any change in the state of any one of the commons could lead to a potential action or a cascade of actions. In this paper we illustrate the use of a platform with three components: 1) Eventshop, an event processor, 2) Krumbs a micr...

This paper presents a category theoretic ontology of Carnatic music. Our goals here are twofold. First, we will demonstrate the power and flexibility of conceptual modeling techniques based on a branch of mathematics called category theory (CT), using the structure of Carnatic music as an example. Second, we describe a platform for collaboration an...

As we extend the reach of the Internet through sensing and automation, networked interactions become more critical and safety and security require improved means for designing and testing system components, platforms and services. A tremendous amount of messy, heterogeneous data passes through such networks; integrating and applying that data so th...

Planning of transportation infrastructure is built upon an established set of planning methods to estimate the need for and specifications of roads, amongst others. The abstraction from the real world as needed for applying clear planning tools has grown to considerably differ from the complex urban fabric of activities underlying the transport dem...

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the use of category theory (CT) as a basis for the integration of manufacturing service databases. In this paper, we use as our reference prior work by Kulvatunyou et al. (2013, "An Analysis of OWL-Based Semantic Mediation Approaches to Enhance Manufacturing Service Capability Models," Int. J. Comput. Integr....

This paper reports a case study of design and engineering change management in the design and manufacture of automated train systems in a company. The paper uses a combination of surveys and interviews to map the information flow processes in the design and engineering processes. Based on the interviews and data collected on information flow and co...

Smart systems are everywhere. They have the unique ability to optimize their performance under a variety of inputs and recover quickly from a wide variety of disturbances. This ability depends on both the cognitive and physical capabilities of such systems. Currently available cyber technologies have dramatically increased the cognitive capabilitie...

In this paper we describe a functorial data migration scenario about the manufacturing service capability of a distributed supply chain. The scenario is a category-theoretic analog of an OWL ontology-based semantic enrichment scenario developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The scenario is presented using, and is inc...

Any large organisation spanning multiple buildings and locations faces the complex problem of managing resources and services in an effective, sustainable and reliable manner. In order to do so, it is important to approach the problem from a behavioural, technical and policy aspects. To begin with, we consider electricity as one resource in the cam...

Despite frequent blackouts and brownouts, extension of the central grid remains the Indian government׳s preferred strategy for the country׳s rural electrification policy. This study reports an assessment that compares grid extension with distributed generation (DG) alternatives, based on the subsidies they will necessitate, and costs of service int...

Players of serious games are culturally sensitive agents; by interacting with the game and other players they bring their own culture into the game. This can result in conflicting behaviour that hampers the players to reach the objectives of the game. It is therefore necessary that the design of the game architecture is adjusted to the players’ cul...

Designing is a fundamental human activity. We use it to solve our problems, reach beyond us to unknown worlds outside our galaxy and inside the atoms; we do designing to create our future for better or worse. With designing having such importance, it is critical that we understand what designing is and how can we improve it in our lives. It is a pr...

Technology life cycles are becoming shorter as is the time for those technologies to become ubiquitous in the society. The Industrial Revolution took about 150 years; but the computer revolution took only 50 years. Cell phones, which hit the market in the early 1980s took only 25 years to become a global phenomenon. Computers and cell phones are tw...

Planning and Design of Energy Policy in India is a wicked problem, and the lack of awareness about its complexity, among the public and even among those with a working knowledge about the domain is an associated issue. In this paper we describe the Indian Energy Game which is designed to address the above issues through game based experiential lear...

The March 2013 special issue of Res Engineering Design was launched to gain better understanding of the early efforts in design theory, as well as showcasing promising contemporary research in design theory. Many of the papers of the special issue study multiple design theories and compare them. The papers in the special issues dialog with multiple...

Institutional theory and the capability approach have grown influential in development research and practice. Both theories offer analytical tools for interpreting and guiding information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) interventions. In this article, we propose an analytical framework that applies institutional theory and the...

Designing progresses through continuous refinement of models. In today's design practice, these models get created and refined by multi-cultural, multidisciplinary teams that speak different languages, whether these languages are spoken language, disciplinary, or organizational language. When these people come together, they create, negotiate, evol...

Designing is a multi-dimensional phenomenon and is difficult to describe through one disciplinary research lens only. This paper uses a framework within which multiple theories of designing could be informed of their role and explanatory power. The Product space and Social Space framework describes the scope of designing activities and it allows fo...

This paper analyzes the workflow and implementation of electronic health record (EHR) systems across different functions in small physician offices. We characterize the differences in the offices based on the levels of computerization in terms of workflow, sources of time delay, and barriers to using EHR systems to support the entire workflow. The...

Creativity is central to human activity and is a powerful force in personal and organizational success. Approaches to supporting creativity are diverse and numerous. The only way to understand the diversity and utility of these methods is through their careful analysis. The analysis conducted in this paper is done with the aid of a theory. As a fir...

This talk will be drawn from examples of the use of technology to provide low cost healthcare in India. Many examples focus on the bottom half of the population, including innovations for infectious disease diagnosis and treatment, nutrition and water quality. Other innovations address the growing epidemic of chronic diseases, including gastric dis...

Approaches to supporting creativity are diverse and numerous. Making sense of these methods, including the comparative benefits of one approach over another is highly significant to both research and practice of creative design. This paper demonstrates the benefit of conducting analyses of methods with the aid of a theory. Such an approach provides...

This paper addresses the issue of ‘What is designing?’ from an unconventional perspective and aims to advance our understanding of what design really is. Designing has been studied from different perspectives but the underlying theoretical basis of studying the act has often been dispersed and not clear. To address these shortcomings, the paper pro...

The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) in India has proposed the Perform, Achieve and Trade mechanism to improve industrial energy efficiency. Several European countries and Australia have other energy efficiency schemes. Major developing economies like India and China are also engaged in reducing energy consumption, lowering energy intensity in a m...

The editors of this journal have offered an opportunity to reply to Dr. Hazelrigg’s letter in depth. Indeed, with its numerous points of critique of the paper ‘‘The Pugh Controlled Convergence method’’ (Frey et al. 2009) stated so strongly, the letter demands a detailed rebuttal. We provide a response to the specific points discussed in the letter...

Sustainable economic development necessitates a careful design of the energy infrastructure. The energy infrastructure is primarily composed of energy producers on the supply side, the energy consumers on the demand side and the network which connects them. The increasing energy demand, the spiraling cost of capacity addition and the global climate...

This paper evaluates the Pugh Controlled Convergence method and its relationship to recent developments in design theory. Computer executable models are proposed simulating a team of people involved in iterated cycles of evaluation, ideation, and investigation. The models suggest that: 1) convergence of the set of design concepts is facilitated by...

The study presented in this paper analyzes the workflow and implementation of electronic health record (EHR) systems in small physician primary care offices. We characterize these offices in terms of workflow, sources of time delay, and barriers to the support of the entire workflow through the use of EHR systems through an primary care exemplar of...

We have been developing a novel method for systematizing the concepts behind the information stored in many disparate databases containing materials test data. The conceptual structure produced will be used as a basis for the development of software systems which integrate engineers' access to many different databases. The major problems and the re...

Creativity is central to human activity and is a powerful force in personal and organizational success. Approaches to supporting creativity are diverse and numerous. The only way to understand the diversity and utility of these methods is through their careful analysis. This paper demonstrates the benefit of conducting analyses of methods with the...

Ensuring the long-term usability of engineering informatics (EI) artifacts is a challenge, particularly for products with longer lifecycles than the computing hardware and software used for their design and manufacture. Addressing this challenge requires characterizing the nature of EI, defining metrics for EI sustainability, and developing methods...

In response to the global trend towards implementing sustainable manufacturing practices, we put forth an exploratory approach that uses energy monitoring as a means to introduce sustainability criteria early into manufacturing process planning. Typically cost, quality and time are the indices for manufacturability assessment in generating manufact...