A huge congratulations to Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee for being awarded the 2022 Graduate Student Teaching Award from the Mechanical Engineering Department. Based on several nominations, the department will present Abheek with the award at the spring Faculty and Staff award celebration.
BiSSL MS student Tyler Wilson and Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee have had two papers accepted to ASME’s 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2022). The papers will be presented in St. Louis, Missouri in August.
Tyler and Abheek collaborated on the paper “Exploring the Effects of Partnership and Inventory for Supply Chain Resilience Using an Ecological Network Analysis,” submitted to Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle (DFMLC).
Abheek collaborated with undergraduate Cade Helbig and Dr. Rich Malak on the paper “A Survey of Graph-Theoretic Approaches for Resilient System of Systems Design,” submitted to System Engineering and Information Knowledge Management (SEIKM).
A collaborative paper with Dr. Julie Linsey at Georgia Institute of Technology, led by BiSSL Ph.D. student Samuel Blair and co-written with MS student Garrett Hairston, has been accepted to the 2022 ASEE Conference & Exposition. The paper, titled “Modularity Analysis of Makerspaces to Determine Potential Hubs and Critical Tools in the Makerspace,” was accepted to the Design in Engineering Education Division. The conference will be held in Minneapolis, MN at the end of June.
Abstract: Globally, universities have heavily invested in makerspaces. Purposeful investment however requires an understanding of how students use tools and how tools aid in engineering education. This paper utilizes a modularity analysis in combination with student surveys to analyze and understand the space as a network of student-tool interactions. The results show that a modularity analysis is able to identify the roles of different tool groupings in the space by measuring how well tool groups are connected within their own “module” and their connection to tools outside of their module. A highly connected tool in both categories is considered a hub that is critical to the network. Poorly connected tools indicate insignificance or under utilization. Makerspaces at two universities were investigated: School A with a full-time staff running the makerspace and School B run by student-volunteers. The results show that 3D printers and metal tools are hubs at School A and 3D printers, metal tools, and laser cutters are hubs at School B. School B was also found to have a higher overall interaction with all the tools in the space. The modularity analysis results are validated using two-semesters worth of student self-reported survey data. The results support the use of a modularity analysis as a way to analyze and visualize the complex network interactions occurring within a makerspace, which can support the improvement of current makerspaces and development of future makerspaces.
Blair, Samuel, Henry Banks, Garrett Hairston, Julie Linsey, and Astrid Layton. 2022. “Modularity Analysis of Makerspaces to Determine Potential Hubs and Critical Tools in the Makerspace.” ASEE 2022 Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
The BiSSL group is very proud of our own Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee, who was one of a select few graduate students chosen to present their doctoral research at the SERC Annual Sponsor Research Review’s Doctoral Student Forum. His presentation is titled “Ecology-Inspired Design of Resilient and Affordable System of Systems.”
We’re excited to be presenting research done in collaboration with Dr. Richard Malak and BiSSL (Abheek Chatterjee) at the annual SERC sponsor research review. The presentation covers the work we’ve done on our grant “Ecology-Inspired Techniques for Resilient Design of System of Systems (SoS).”
Congratulations to Ph.D. candidate Abheek Chatterjee, Ph.D. student Samuel Blair, and MS student Garrett Hairston for being awarded J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Fellowships for Fall 2021 in recognition of the great research they’ve been doing as graduate students!
Big congratulations to BiSSL Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee for his paper “Ecology‐inspired resilient and affordable system of systems using degree of system order” – which investigates applying ecological resilience measures to the design of Systems of Systems (SoS) and has now been published!
Abstract: This research tests the value of using an ecology-inspired architectural metric, called the metric Degree of System Order (DoSO), to identify resilient and affordable engineered System of Systems (SoS) architectures. Analysis of long-surviving biological ecosystems (nature’s resilient SoS) using DoSO has revealed a unique balance of efficient and redundant interactions in their architectures. This balance is hypothesized to enable both effective resource utilization under normal operation and adaptability to survive and recover from perturbations. Optimal trade-off between resilience (the ability to survive and recover from disruptions) and affordability is highly desirable in engineering SoS as well. To test this analogy, the resilience vs. affordability tradespace of a large number of notional SoS architectures is investigated using the DoSO metric. Results indicate that the majority of Pareto optimal SoS architectures, under various disruption scenarios, lie in the ecologically identified favorable DoSO range. Further, SoS architectures within this DoSO range were found to have better resilience and affordability attributes, in general, than the architectures outside it. Evaluation of the DoSO metric does not require detailed simulations and is the first network architecture metric to consider resilience vs. affordability trade-offs, making it a valuable addition to the SoS engineering toolset.
A. Chatterjee, R. Malak, and A. Layton, “Ecology-inspired Resilient and Affordable System of Systems using Degree of System Order,” Systems Engineering, pp. 1-16, 2021, Art no. SYS21598, doi: 10.1002/sys.21598.
Three BiSSL students had conference papers presented at the 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conference!
Ph.D. candidate Abheek Chatterjee and MS student Tyler Wilson presented their paper on modifying bio-inspired system design methodologies for supply chains, enabling the impact of storage to be considered when applying resilience characteristics from nature. Their paper was presented on Tuesday, August 17 in the Design Theory and Methodology session DTM-04 Design Research: Empirical and Experimental Studies.
MS student Garrett Hairston presented his paper, which focuses on using a system perspective to develop net zero design guidelines for multi-use (industrial, residential, commercial) communities from biological food webs, on Thursday, August 19 in the Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle session DFMLC-08-01/DAC-20-01: Modeling and Optimization for Sustainable Design and Manufacturing.
Congratulations to Tejas Adsul and Andrew Foster who both successfully defended their MS theses and will be graduating this summer!
Tejas Adsul’s MS thesis is titled “Ant-Inspired Innovation Research Strategies” and based on work with Dr. Cynthia Hipwell from Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Robert Puckett from Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
Andrew Foster is graduating with his masters in energy through the Texas A&M Energy Institute. His thesis is “Ecological Uniqueness for Understanding Component Importance in Power Grids” and was done in collaboration with Dr. Kate Davis in Electrical Engineering.
BiSSL MS students Samuel Blair and Garrett Hairston were awarded a J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Summer Research Grant for Summer 2021 for their proposals titled: “Ecological Systems Approach to Understanding Makerspace Networks” and “Ecological-modularity as inspiration for community-scale net zero achievement,” respectively. Congratulations Samuel and Garrett!
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 