Thermoelastic Stability of Deployable Space Telescopes

Imagery collected from space provides very useful information about our planet. Today there are many Earth Observation satellites in orbit which allow us to collect information which is used for environmental monitoring, response to catastrophes, surveillance and security, urban planning, economic analysis and many other applications. Thus,...

Structured Electronics Design: A Conceptual Approach to Amplifier Design

Many people consider analog electronic circuit design complex. This is because designers can achieve the desired performance of a circuit in many ways. Together, theoretical concepts, circuit topologies, electronic devices, their operating conditions, and the system's physical construction constitute an enormous design space in which it is easy...

A guideline for selecting MDAO workflows with an application in offshore wind energy

A system is a set of interconnected components whose individual behaviour and interactions determine the overall performance of the set. Wind farms are amongst the most complex systems deployed worldwide, based on their uncertainty, heterogeneity and complexity. Moreover, many technical and social disciplines may simultaneously describe the...

Collecting lessons learned: How project-based organizations in the oil and gas industry learn from their projects

Project-based organizations collect lessons learned in order to improve the performance of projects. They aim to repeat successes by using positive lessons learned, and to avoid repeating negative experiences by using negative lessons learned. Cooke-Davies (2002) claimed that the ability to learn from past projects for future projects is a key...

Structured automated code checking through structural components and systems engineering

This paper presents a proposal to employ the design computing methodology proposed as StructuralComponents (Rolvink et al [6] and van de Weerd et al [7]) as a method to perform a digital verification process to fulfil the requirements related to structural design and engineering as part of a building design. In current design and engineering...

Structuring of early design decisions in large infrastructure tenders: How to find the optimal design?

Decision making in the tender phase of large infrastructural projects is a complex task for contractors as they have to make design decisions with long term effects and based on complex client requirements. Further complexity is added by the constrained environment of a tender and the uncertainty of winning the tender. As the context and the...

Flexible gas infrastructures

Designing socio-technical systems: Structures and processes

The Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management (SEPAM) MSc curriculum taught at Delft University of Technology focuses on the design of socio-technical systems (STS). We teach our students to structure design activities by considering what we call the TIP aspects: Technical systems, Institutions, and decision-making Processes. Students...

Development of a Methodology to Support Design of Complex Aircraft Wings

The design of complex systems in today’s aerospace domain requires a balance between the ever-increasing complexity of the supporting technology and the drive to develop those systems in a compressed timeframe. The performance knowledge of a preliminary design must shift backwards in the lifecycle in order to exploit that knowledge when there is...

System and Actor Perspectives on Sociotechnical Systems

This paper addresses the complexity of analyzing and designing sociotechnical systems: systems that involve both complex physical-technical systems and networks of interdependent actors. It is shown that, although a hard system perspective and an actor perspective differ greatly in terms of terminology, methods, and applicability, they also show...

CAFCR: A Multi-view Method for Embedded Systems Architecting. Balancing Genericity and Specificity

This thesis describes the CAFCR method for embedded systems architecting. Embedded systems are software and technology intensive systems. Typical examples of software and technology intensive products are televisions, DVD-players, MRI scanners, and printers. The creation of these products is a multi-disciplinary effort by hundreds of engineers....

Selected topics in identification, modelling and control: Progress report on research activities in the mechanical engineering systems and control group