Panos Papalambros

• MS, PhD Mech. Eng. (Stanford University); Diploma Mech. & Elec. Eng. (NTU Athens)
• Professor at University of Michigan

title>ABSTRACT Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA) is a promising tool for validating tests and computational models by means of comparing the multivariate time histories they generate to available field data. Following PPCA by interval-based Bayesian hypothesis testing enables acceptance or rejection of the tests and models given th...

title>ABSTRACT Crowdsourcing is an overarching term that denotes a number of ways to use the web as means to enlist a large number of individuals to perform a particular task. The tasks can range from simply providing an opinion, to contributing material, to solving a problem. Because the term crowdsourcing is used to denote a variety of activitie...

title>ABSTRACT The value of modularity in ground vehicles to the Army and other services has been a topic of much debate for decades. There are instances of successful implementations of modularity in current ground vehicle programs of record. However, these implementations have generally been accomplished through swappable mission equipment rathe...

Design optimization evolved in parallel to operations research as a way to codify and support design decisions mathematically. Design thinking emerged as a way to describe a user-centered design process that seeks to unpack the core values behind design decisions. In the modern definition of Design Science—as the field that studies the creation of...

Resilience is broadly understood as the capacity of a system to absorb, adapt, and transform in response to significant changes in its external environment. Improving resilience requires design trade-offs, for example, increases in equipment capacity and capital costs. This paper explores resilience trade-offs for food security and crop production...

With the continuously increasing integration of (mechanical) products, the identification and management of trade-offs becomes a major task in product synthesis, with substantial effect on optimality and robustness of the final solution. At the same time, a rigorous and comprehensive study of trade-offs through mathematical design optimisation is o...

Resilience is a widely studied concept that is a key objective in the design and development of sustainable systems. This is especially true for the agricultural systems critical to food production, economic viability, and sustainability of our communities, as farmers seek to meet increasing demand in the face of shocks such as climate change and n...

Integrated Natural Resource Conservation and Development (INRCD) Projects promote community economic development consistent with natural resource conservation. Such projects are studied analytically as system design optimization problems comprising engineering, economic, and social considerations. Modeling social benefits as objectives or constrain...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21650349.2022.2021480

Configuration (or topology or embodiment) design remains a ubiquitous challenge in product design optimization and in design automation, meaning configuration design is largely driven by experience in industrial practice. In this article, we introduce a novel configuration redesign process founded on the interaction of the designer with results fro...

Multiobjective design optimization studies typically derive Pareto sets or use a scalar substitute function to capture design trade-offs, leaving it up to the designer's intuition to use this information for design refinements and decision making. Understanding the causality of trade-offs more deeply, beyond simple post-optimality parametric studie...

Integrated Natural Resource Conservation and Development (INRCD) Projects are efforts at worldwide locations to promote economic development of local communities consistent with conservation of natural resources. This umbrella term includes Integration Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) introduced by the World Wide Fund to combine social...

Integrated Natural Resource and Conservation Development (INRCD) Projects is an umbrella term for a variety of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), a concept first introduced by the World Wide Fund for Nature in the mid 1980s to target practice-oriented efforts in developing countries; and Integrated Natural Resource Management...

Coordination of distributed design work is an important activity in large-scale and complex engineered systems (LSCES) design projects. Coordination strategies have been studied formally in system design optimization and organizational science. This article reports on a study to identify what strategies are used in coordination practice. While the...

The design community can contribute significantly to the success of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Africa. Currently, alignment of the design research community on sustainable development goals in Africa is not well understood. In this paper, we review relevant literature and identify trends in research topics studied and in pa...

Funding for design impacts the practical ability to address relevant problems. Using public sources, we explore funding aimed at design and business innovations for sustainable development in Africa provided by NGOs, governments, and multinational organizations. We focus on agriculture, energy, sanitation, and urban development, with successful or...

Visual design is critical to product success, and the subject of intensive marketing research effort. Yet visual elements, due to their holistic and interactive nature, do not lend themselves well to optimization using extant decompositional methods for preference elicitation. Here we present a systematic methodology to incorporate interactive, 3D-...

Modularity in vehicle systems can reduce total lifecycle cost and improve adaptability for ground military fleets. This paper quantifies the adaptability of vehicle fleets to changes in supply route characteristics defined by route distance, threat level, and damage probability. Each characteristic is discretized into three levels, and the adaptabi...

Systems engineering and design thinking have been widely seen as distinctly different processes, systems engineering being more data-driven and analytical, and design thinking being more human- centred and creative. We use the term ‘design thinking’ to encompass the plurality of human-centered design processes that seek to unpack the core values be...

Coordination in system design requires an interplay between different roles. In this work, we identify five design team roles that pertain to the partitioning and coordination of distributed design team tasks. The proposed characterization is based on self-reported responsibilities and communication behaviors from 109 student designers in 22 teams...

Consumers’ choice of services and the product platforms that deliver them, such as apps and mobile devices, or eBooks and eReaders, are becoming inextricably interrelated. Market viability demands that product–service combinations be compatible across multiple producers and service channels, and that the producers’ profitability must include both s...

Manufacturers must decide when to invest and launch a new vehicle segment or how to redesign vehicles existing segment under market uncertainties. We present an optimization framework for redesigning or investing in future vehicles using real options to address uncertainty in gas price and regulatory standards like the U.S. Corporate Average Fuel E...

The value proposition for ground vehicle modularity in the U.S. Army and other services has been a topic of continuing debate. Studies to date have largely focused on individual system elements such as manufacturing or maintenance, lacking a holistic perspective of the implications of modularity for the entire fleet operation and life-cycle. The U....

A collection of interacting systems, such as a fleet of military vehicles, can have a life-cycle benefit from sharing interoperable modules. Defining the modules that maximize such benefits must be addressed at the early stages of system design. We present a multi-objective optimization framework for conceptual modular design. We use a functional r...

Advancements in multiple domains have led to a focus on autonomy in engineered systems. This focus necessitates a clear definition of the term ‘autonomy’ and its implications for system design. To this end, we present a framework that defines autonomy mathematically as a function of independence and task complexity. A deeper understanding is establ...

Design thinking (DT) and engineering systems thinking (EST) are two complementary approaches to understanding cognition, organization, and other non-technical factors that influence the design and performance of engineering systems. Until relatively recently, these two concepts have been explored in isolation from one another; design thinking metho...

Aesthetic appeal is a primary driver of customer consideration for products such as automobiles. Product designers must accordingly convey design attributes (e.g., 'Sportiness'), a challenging proposition given the subjective nature of aesthetics and heterogeneous market segments with potentially different aesthetic preferences. We introduce a scal...

Design preference models are used widely in product planning and design development. Their prediction accuracy requires large amounts of personal user data including purchase and other personal choice records. With increased Internet and smart device use, sources of personal data are becoming more varied and their capture more ubiquitous. This situ...

Crowdsourcing offers the opportunity to gather evaluations on concept designs from evaluators that otherwise may not have been considered, thus leveraging additional expertise to improve decision making during early stages of the design process. Previous research has shown that crowdsourcing may fail to evaluate correctly even ‘simple’ engineering...

Car sharing services promise "green" transportation systems. Two vehicle technologies offer marketable, sustainable sharing: autonomous vehicles (AVs) eliminate customer requirements for car pick-up and return, and battery electric vehicles entail zero emissions. Designing an autonomous electric vehicle (AEV) fleet must account for the relationship...

Customers nowadays consider the driver's seat, specifically its comfort and aesthetic form, during the automobile purchase decision. As a result, much research has been recently conducted into seat comfort and the influence of the visual appearance of the seat on the perception of comfort. However, the cost of the seat remains an important contribu...

Manufacturers launch new product models at various time increments to meet changing market requirements over time. At each design period, product design and price may change. While price decisions can be made at product launching time, redesign decisions must be made in advance. Real options theory addresses such time gap decisions. This paper pres...

Product forms in quantitative design methods are typically expressed with a mathematical representation such as vectors, trees, graphs, and grammars. Such formal representations are restrictive in terms of realism or flexibility, and this limits their utility for human designers who typically create product forms in a design space that is restricte...

Quantitative preference models are used to predict customer choices among design alternatives by collecting prior purchase data or survey answers. This paper examines how to improve the prediction accuracy of such models without collecting more data or changing the model. We propose to use features as an intermediary between the original customer-l...

This work presents a new method for designing and evaluating different fleet paradigms to determine an effective and cost efficient solution. The method requires the user to define a set of functions which must be carried out by the fleet, as well as a set of candidate vehicles or systems that can carry out these functions. These function and fleet...

Effective electrification of automotive vehicles requires designing the powertrain's configuration along with sizing its components for a particular vehicle type. Employing planetary gear (PG) systems in hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) powertrain architectures allows various architecture alternatives to be explored, including single-mode architecture...

Existing hybrid powertrain architectures, i.e., the connections from engine and motors to the vehicle output shaft, are designed for particular vehicle applications, e.g., passenger cars or city buses, to achieve good fuel economy. For effective electrification of new applications (e.g., heavy-duty trucks or racing cars), new architectures may need...

The premium vehicle segment has focused on excellent manufacturing quality, while in contrast the luxury segment has focused on emotional and personalized appeal. We perform qualitative analysis of interviews with Italian, Swedish, and American premium and luxury vehicle manufacturers. Results indicate customers of luxury vehicles now consider qual...

Governments encourage use of electric vehicles (EV) via regulation and investment to minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Manufacturers produce vehicles to maximize profit, given available public infrastructure and government incentives. EV public adoption depends not only on price and vehicle attributes, but also on EV market size and infrastr...

We compare the performance of human players against that of the efficient global optimization (EGO) algorithm for an NP-complete powertrain design and control problem. Specifically, we cast this optimization problem as an online competition and received 2391 game plays by 124 anonymous players during the first month from launch. We found that while...

Modularity for ground vehicle systems has been viewed as a potential solution for the military to meet a variety of changing mission demands without keeping a large inventory of vehicles in a fleet. Defining the module concepts is a significant challenge that impacts the effectiveness of the modularity solution. In this paper, we propose a function...

Designers faced with the task of developing a new product model of a brand must balance several considerations. The design must be novel and express attributes important to the customers, while also recognizable as a representative of the brand. This balancing is left to the intuition of the designers, who must anticipate how customers will perceiv...

The simulation-based design optimization of an electric-vehicle (EV) propulsion system requires integration of a system model with detailed models of the components. In particular, a high-fidelity interior-permanent-magnet (IPM) motor model is necessary to capture important physical effects, such as magnetic saturation. The system optimization chal...

Car-sharing services promise “green” transportation systems. Two vehicle technologies offer marketable, sustainable sharing: Autonomous vehicles eliminate customer requirements for car pick-up and return, and battery electric vehicles entail zero-emissions. Designing an Autonomous Electric Vehicle (AEV) fleet must account for the relationships amon...

Effective electrification of automotive vehicles requires designing the powertrain’s configuration along with sizing its components for a particular vehicle type. Employing planetary gear systems in hybrid electric vehicle powertrain architectures allows various architecture alternatives to be explored, including single-mode architectures that are...

We investigate the cost and benefit of crowdsourcing solutions to an NP-complete powertrain design and control problem. Specifically, we cast this optimization problem as an online competition, and received 2391 game plays by 124 anonymous players during the first week from the launch. We compare the performance of human players against that of the...

Designers faced with the task of developing the next model of a brand must balance several considerations. The design must be novel and express attributes important to the customers, while also recognizable as a representative of the brand. This balancing is left to the intuition of the designers, who must anticipate how all customers will perceive...

The Design Science journal is a designed product, maybe also a designed product-service system. After all the insights, experiences, data collections and scientific analyses have played their role, bringing a design into existence remains an act of faith. This journal is no exception. It is a collective act of faith by a large number of people who...

A major barrier in consumer adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is 'range anxiety,' the concern that the vehicle will run out of power at an inopportune time. Range anxiety is caused by the current relatively low electric-only operational range and sparse public charging station infrastructure. Range anxiety may be significantly mitigated if EV man...

Crowdsourced evaluation is a promising method of evaluating engineering design attributes that require human input. The challenge is to correctly estimate scores using a massive and diverse crowd, particularly when only a small subset of evaluators has the expertise to give correct evaluations. Since averaging evaluations across all evaluators will...

This paper presents an industrial application of the analytical target cascading methodology to optimal design of commercial vehicle systems. The design problems concern the suspension of a heavy-duty truck and the body structure of a small bus. The results provide valuable insights in the feasibility of system-level design targets and the adequacy...

One approach to multiobjective optimization is to define a scalar substitute objective function that aggregates all objectives and solve the resulting aggregate optimization problem (AOP). In this paper, we discern that the objective function in quasi-separable multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problems can be viewed as an aggregate objec...

Conjoint analysis from marketing has been successfully integrated with engineering analysis in design for market systems. The long questionnaires needed for conjoint analysis in relatively complex design decisions can become cumbersome to the human respondents. This paper presents an adaptive questionnaire generation strategy that uses active learn...

Motivated by continued interest within the design community to model design preferences, this paper investigates the question of predicting preferences with particular application to consumer purchase behavior: How can we obtain high prediction accuracy in a consumer preference model using market purchase data? To this end, we employ sparse coding...

A hybrid-electric vehicle powertrain architecture consists of single or multiple driving modes, i.e., connection arrangements among engine, motors and vehicle output shaft that determine distribution of power. While most architecture development work to date has focused primarily on passenger cars, interest has been growing in exploring architectur...

For several decades, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) has served an important role in aerospace engineering by incorporating physics-based disciplinary models into integrated system or sub-system models for use in research, development, (R&D) and design. This paper examines MDO's role in facilitating the integration of the researchers fr...

This study investigates interdisciplinary interactions that take place during the research, development, and early conceptual design phases in the engineering of large-scale complex engineered systems (LaCES) such as aerospace vehicles. These interactions that occur throughout a large engineering development organization, become the initial conditi...

In recent years, the greatest safety threat to military personnel has been from underbody vehicle blast events, but other major threats exist against fuel convoys and due to rollover events. Ground vehicle designers make choices that affect one or more of these risk areas, including the weight and structural design of the vehicle underbody, as well...

In this paper we study the role of metaphorical design concepts in triggering a mindful consumption behavior. Through a retrospective study on persuasive metaphorical designs for behavior change, we identified 7 persuasive heuristics for using metaphors for behavior change. According to the ELM of persuasion and persuasive effect of visual metaphor...

Crowdsourced evaluation is a promising method for evaluating attributes of design concepts that require human input. One factor in obtaining good evaluations is the ratio of high-ability to low-ability participants within the crowd. In this paper we introduce a Bayesian network model capable of finding participants with high design evaluation abili...

Several hybrid-electric vehicle architectures have been commercialized to serve different categories of vehicles and driving conditions. Such architectures can be optimally controlled by switching among driving modes, namely, the power distribution schemes in their planetary gear (PG) transmissions, in order to operate the vehicle in the most effic...

We examine the problem of eliciting the most preferred designs of a user from a finite set of designs through iterative pairwise comparisons presented to the user. The key challenge is to select proper queries (i.e., presentations of design pairs to the user) in order to minimize the number of queries. Previous work formulated elicitation as a blac...

Computational simulation models support a rapid design process. Given model approximation and operating conditions uncertainty, designers must have confidence that the designs obtained using simulations will perform as expected. The traditional approach to address this need consists of model validation efforts conducted predominantly prior to the o...

Optimization of a ‘smart’ product requires optimizing the design of both the physical system, or artifact, and its controller. If the artifact and control optimization are coupled, then a combined approach is typically used in order to produce optimal solutions. The combined approach presents certain disadvantages, however. This combined approach o...

Active safety features and adjustments to the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) consumer-information crash tests have the potential to decrease the number of serious traffic injuries each year, according to previous studies. However, literature suggests that risk reductions, particularly in the automotive market, are often accompanied by adjusted c...

Homogeneous charge compression ignition technology can improve fuel economy by providing increased efficiency at low-load operation. This article examines the implementation of this technology in hybrid propulsion systems. To assess the benefits, a physics-based model for a spark ignition–homogeneous charge compression ignition dual-operation engin...

Many countries have instituted New Car Assessment Programs (NCAPs) to help consumers compare the crashworthiness of automobiles on the market. These typically involve four or five standardised tests, for which each new vehicle is rated on a 5-star scale. The ratings are available to customers and so, automakers strive for high scores by optimising...

Crowdsourcing processes can be used for design concept creation and evaluation. They also provide opportunities to study and model quantitatively how humans deal with design problems. This paper explores the use of crowdsourcing to evaluate a perceptual design attribute and to create new design concepts using this attribute. As an example, we study...

As products become service platforms, customers purchase both products and their associated services. Service attributes affect product choices, and product choices affect to service demand and profit during the products life cycle. Enterprises offering such product service systems (PSS) must co-design products and services to maximize overall prof...

In order to support successful strategies in design education and practice, we must have a deep understanding of the complex dynamics of design processes, teams, contexts, and systems. Facilitating this understanding of engineering design requires research methodologies that can capture the nature of the design process from a diversity of aspects s...

System performance can significantly benefit from optimally integrating the passive and active elements of vehicle suspension systems. The present article introduces an approach that combines passive and active elements to improve the robustness of a vehicle suspension system with respect to a worst-case scenario. This integrated passive and active...

We define preference elicitation as an interaction, consisting of a sequence of computer queries and human implicit feedback (binary choices), from which the user’s most preferred design can be elicited. The difficulty of this problem is that, while a human-computer interaction must be short to be effective, query algorithms usually require lengthy...

Active learning refers to the mechanism of querying users to accomplish a classification task in machine learning or a conjoint analysis in econometrics with minimum cost. Classification and conjoint analysis have been introduced to design research to automate design feasibility checking and to construct marketing demand models, respectively. In th...

In this paper we studied the role of color in triggering recycling behavior. According to the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion we hypothesized that the visual salience of recycling bins encourages recycling behavior, presumably through a peripheral route and would increase the probability that the recycling bin will be seen and used. I...

"EARTH" is a three-component metric that quantifies discrepancies between time histories (Error Assessment of Response Time Histories).