Our paper titled “Understanding Design Decisions under Competition using Games with Information Acquisition and a Function Optimization Experiment” is accepted by the Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD), ASME Transaction. The paper will be soon available at JMD website.

Abstract:  The primary motivation in this paper is to understand decision-making in design under competition from both prescriptive and descriptive perspectives. Engineering design is often carried out under competition from other designers or firms, where each competitor invests effort with the hope of getting a contract, attracting customers, or winning a prize. One such scenario of design under competition is crowdsourcing where designers compete for monetary prizes. Within existing literature, such competitive scenarios have been studied using models from contest theory, which are based on assumptions of rationality and equilibrium. Although these models are general enough for different types of contests, they do not address the unique characteristics of design decision-making, e.g., strategies related to the design process, the sequential nature of design decisions, the evolution of strategies, and heterogeneity among designers. In this paper, we address these gaps by developing an analytical model for design under competition, and using it in conjunction with a behavioral experiment to gain insights about how individuals actually make decisions in such scenarios. The contributions of the paper are two fold. First, a game-theoretic model is presented for sequential design decisions considering the decisions made by other players. Second, an approach for synergistic integration of analytical models with data from behavioral experiments is presented. The proposed approach provides insights such as shift in participants’ strategies from exploration to exploitation as they acquire more information, and how they develop beliefs about the quality of their opponents’ solutions.

We are awarded the Engineering Research and Innovation Seed Funding (ERISF) by the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas (UA). As introduced on the program website, “The overarching goal of the ERISF program is to assist engineering researchers in developing new innovative research programs that have strong potential for significant future support from government agencies, corporations, industry, consortia, or foundations.”

In this interdisciplinary research project, we aim to understand engineering design thinking in complex systems design. In particular, we are interested in quantitatively characterizing and computationally modeling designers’ thinking in three aspects: the divergent-convergent reasoning, the system thinking and the sequential decision-making in engineering design. The accomplishment of this project will lay the foundation for our future study towards realizing artificial intelligence assisted design (AIAD). This project will be carried out through a collaborative effort with  Dr. Michael Gashler from the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the UA, and Dr. Charles Xie from Concord Consortium. See more introduction on our Research Project page.

We had a strong finish for MED class in Spring 2017. Look at these smiles! Thank you, students. I enjoyed the semester and I look forward to the upcoming summer research life.

We are one of the five this year to be awarded the new grant, the Open Education Resources Incentive Program, at the University of Arkansas. Our effort in adopting OER to help students access low-cost, open access educational materials is seen by the local community. See the news report from Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette: http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/apr/29/33-000-in-ua-grants-aim-to-cut-student–1/.

I will work with Dr. Panchal and Dr. Bilionis from Purdue University to organize a workshop on The ASME 2017 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in August at Cleveland, Ohio. This workshop is about “Lab Experiments on Individual and Interactive Decision Making in Design“.  When registering this conference, please consider to attend our workshop if you are interested.

Abstract: Decision-making is at the core of engineering design. While there has been significant progress in using normative theories to support design decision making, the use of experimental methods for decision making in design is relatively recent. The goal of this workshop is to provide a platform for discussion of the state-of-the-art research of human-subject experiments on understanding individual as well as the interactive decision-making in engineering design. The workshop has four learning objectives: a) understanding the benefits and challenges in using controlled lab experiments in design research, b) understanding the process of designing lab experiments with human subjects, c) learning statistical techniques for analyzing behavioral data, and d) gaining familiarity with modern software platforms for conducting lab experiments in interactive decision.

Our paper titled “Modeling Customer Choice Preferences in Engineering Design Using Bipartite Network Analysis” is accepted by The 43rd Design Automation Conference in The ASME 2017 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2017). The conference this year will be held at Cleveland, Ohio in August. Click here for details about this conference.

Our paper titled “Modeling Product Co-Consideration Relations: A Comparative Study of Two Network Models” has been accepted by the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design. The conference this year will be held at Vancouver, Canada in August. I’m looking forward to it. Click here for details about this conference.

We are awarded Open Education Resources (OER) Grant by the University of Arkansas Libraries and the Global Campus. Click here for more information about OER grant and other related initiatives. We will use this grant to amplify students’ learning outcomes and hands-on experience in the MEEG 4104: Machine Element Design class through the integration of open course, open access publications, and open-source design projects.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Arkansas is seeking an outstanding, highly-qualified, active researcher to collaborate and enhance existing research groups. More information available here.

Before I left today at around 4:15pm, there were 126 freshmen declared their major as mechanical engineering. That is the top 1 amongst 8 engineering departments. Everyone did a good job in showing MEEG spirit. Go Hogs!