Flexibility: a multi-disciplinary literature review and a research agenda for designing flexible engineering systems

Saleh, Joseph H.; Mark, Gregory; Jordan, Nané

doi:10.1080/09544820701870813

Cited by 155 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…More intuitively: flexible systems make transitions over time [45], to meet new circumstances and cope with uncertainty, and thus imply an ease of modification and absence of irreversible or rigid components [46]. Whereas robust designs try to neutralize the impacts of external perturbations, flexible designs do the opposite by intentionally exploiting the changes in their environment.…”

Section: Reconciling Robustness and Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate adaptive building shells: State-of-the-art and future challenges

Loonen

Trcka

Cóstola

et al. 2013

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

518

270

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Section: Reconciling Robustness and Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate adaptive building shells: State-of-the-art and future challenges

Loonen

Trcka

Cóstola

et al. 2013

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

518

270

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“…Beyond options theory, flexibility is discussed from a broad perspective by Saleh et al (2009), reviewing the literature on flexibility from a multi-disciplinary perspective including management, manufacturing, engineering and design. Flexibility is seen as the ability of a system to be modified to meet new requirements (Chalupnik et al, 2013).…”

Section: Platforms and Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating tradeoffs between performance, cost and flexibility for reconfigurable offshore ships

et al. 2018

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This paper investigates technical performance, acquisition cost and flexibility level for reconfigurable offshore ships. An offshore ship can be configured with various types of equipment; thus, its base structure constitutes a platform from which several end ship design configurations can be derived. A ship with equipment retrofit flexibility will typically have excess stability, deadweight and deck area to ensure physical compatibility. However, there are complex system interactions that need consideration, such as the effects of flexibility on cost and performance. The level of flexibility is quantified using filtered outdegree based on a tradespace network representation of the system. Technical performance is measured in terms of capability, capacity and operability, where a multi-attribute utility function is used to aggregate the total performance for comparison. Findings indicate that increased platform flexibility does increase capacity, but comes at a complex compromise with operability as resistance is increased, and roll periods become unfavorable due to high accelerations.

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“…The designs that have some useful transitions and relatively high utility are the designs that can be considered valuably flexible. The metric to identify these designs is called Value Weighted Filtered Outdegree 21 : (2) where N is the number of designs considered k is the current epoch k+1 is the next epoch in the era i is the design under consideration j is the destination design…”

Section: Value Weighted Filtered Outdegreementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Increasing system costs and operational lifetimes has driven research in recent years to develop an understanding of how flexibility can be incorporated into systems during the conceptual design phase. 2 The method for conceptual design discussed in this paper is Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE). 3,4 MATE uses computer models to evaluate the performance of many different designs in utility-cost space.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Flexibility in Tradespace Exploration: Value-Weighted Filtered Outdegree

Viscito

Ross

2009

AIAA SPACE 2009 Conference &Amp; Exposition

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Tradespace exploration as a conceptual design tool provides the ability to examine thousands of system designs. Comparing these designs within the tradespace can reveal performance trends based on design choices. Varying the environment in which the system is evaluated adds another layer of complexity on the analysis. Incorporating time and changing contexts in the conceptual design allows engineers to consider 'ilities', or time-dependent system performance characteristics. Flexibility, the ability to dynamically change the system to mitigate risk or take advantage of opportunity, is difficult to assess within static snapshots of tradespaces. Flexibility is valuable in the presence of future uncertainty, so conceptual analysis should also consider future context changes on the system. A metric to identify valuably flexible designs in a tradespace, Value Weighted Filtered Outdegree, is presented and applied to a satellite radar case application. The metric is able to identify design in the tradespace that would not have been identified with existing tradespace analysis metrics.

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Flexibility: a multi-disciplinary literature review and a research agenda for designing flexible engineering systems

Cited by 155 publications

References 42 publications

Climate adaptive building shells: State-of-the-art and future challenges

Climate adaptive building shells: State-of-the-art and future challenges

Investigating tradeoffs between performance, cost and flexibility for reconfigurable offshore ships

Quantifying Flexibility in Tradespace Exploration: Value-Weighted Filtered Outdegree

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