Project Description (How do the Term Projects Work?)

The projects will be executed in teams of one to three students and be incorporated into the course via part (b) of the assignments, the final presentations and a final report (The final report takes on the form of a conference paper). Here we outline the expected progression of the project:

1. Select a multidisciplinary system to study.
2. Characterize the system, identifying important subsystem models and interactions, selecting important design variables, the objective function and constraints.
3. Develop subsystem models. Existing simulation models may be used, or new models may be developed. Reexamine model partitioning and ensure interface control.
4. Benchmark against an existing system or design to measure the fidelity of the model. Refine the model if necessary.
5. Formulate the optimization problem. Select and apply an appropriate optimization technique after some initial sampling of the design space.
6. Identify competing trades in your system. Perform sensitivity analyses.
7. Obtain and evaluate systematic MSDO results for your system. Compare optimal designs with initial, manual guesses. Identify limitations of subsystem models.
8. Identify additional objective functions. Perform multiobjective optimization.
9. Identify ways to expand your system and increase model fidelity. Review and critique your definition of "optimal".
10. Summarize the project and results in a short presentation and paper at the end of the term.

Project Report and Presentation

Prepare a final report of your class project to be submitted in session 38. We don't expect you to do any new work for this, but you should integrate everything you have done in the part B's of the class assignments A1-A5 into a single coherent report.

The idea is that this could potentially serve as the nucleus of a future conference publication.

Paper Guidelines

Follow the old AIAA conference paper guidelines (two-column, not to exceed 11 pages).

Prepare a final presentation of your class project to be given in sessions 35-37.

Presentation Guidelines

20 minutes (15 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q & A) for all projects - we may choose to combine some of the teams working on canned projects together, and we may vary the presentation time slightly, depending on the team size.

Presentation Outline (Suggestion)

• Project definition (why is this interesting/important?)
• Simulation model setup and integration
• Initial tradespace exploration, DOE, benchmarking
• Single objective system design optimization (also include algorithms used)
• Sensitivity analysis of optimal design from previous step
• Multiobjective design optimization results
• Probabilistic / robust design (if applicable)
• Conclusions and recommended future work

16.888/ESD.77 Final Presentation Rubric 2004 (PDF)

The projects listed below are presented courtesy of and used with the permission of the students named.