(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003-07)
DeLaurentis, Daniel A.; Lewe, Jung-Ho; Schrage, Daniel P.
The goal of a future transportation architecture is an expansion in mobility, enabling new types of travel and commerce currently not affordable and thus producing induced societal benefit. From the design perspective, the complexity, high dimensionality and diverse nature of the design space make study of such architectures extremely difficult. An abstraction framework and modeling hypothesis are proposed, steps vital to the proper start of such an aggressive challenge. The core entities within a transportation architecture are abstracted: stakeholders (consumers, regulators, service providers, etc.), resources (vehicles, infrastructure, etc.) and networks (both explicit for resources and implicit for stakeholders). This abstraction leads to a general description for transportation that is useful from a conceptual modeling point of view stakeholders employ particular resources, organized in networks, in order to achieve mobility objectives. The modeling hypothesis is created stemming from the description and focused upon the need to examine the architecture from a system-of-systems perspective, under the belief that the organization of transportation resources is just as important as the nature and performance of those resources. Subsets of the methodologies are tested on three exploratory research thrusts and the findings are used to project a future path towards full validation of the modeling hypothesis. Ultimately, decision-makers at multiple levels can use the methodologies to quickly understand and visualize the relative merits of alternative architectures.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002-10)
Lewe, Jung-Ho; Ahn, Byung-Ho; DeLaurentis, Daniel A.; Mavris, Dimitri N.; Schrage, Daniel P.
A product?s design requirements guide the next development efforts. Thus, correct decision-making is critical in generating design requirements as vehicle concepts are being formulated. A new method is proposed to account for system-of-systems aspects and to aid a decision-making process in synthesizing design requirements for a personal air vehicle system. The use of an agent-based modeling technique facilitates the abstraction of the key elements in the whole system. A traveling party is treated as an agent, and the infrastructure environment in the national transportation system is easily represented in the model. A number of simulations are performed to demonstrate the capability of this new approach. The method not only measures the effect of design requirements of a personal air vehicle system through sensitivity analyses, but also evaluates the effect of system technologies quantitatively, while maintaining the system-of-systems perspective. With this powerful method, designers can extract essential technical requirements that allow polishing of concept vehicles; policy makers can investigate the infrastructure and technology impact of new systems; and business planners can perform an analysis based on their own market assumptions.