MDO as a Socio-Technical System - A Small Contribution to Collaborative Engineering
Martin Spieck, Benedikt Aigner, Prajwal Shiva Prakasha, Pier Davide Ciampa · RWTH Publications (RWTH Aachen) · 2018
Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is a methodology for the design of complex engineering systems that can largely be automated within a formal framework.Thus, research in MDO mainly concentrates on improvements to the engineering software, the MDO framework and the solution sequences for the optimization problem.In practical applications, however, engineers have to set up the MDO problem, they have to supervise the execution and interpret the results, and they have to present their findings to the decision-makers.Thus, MDO is not only about the synergies from "connecting computers", it is also about connecting the humans behind the computer screens.As a consequence, MDO is not just an automated IT framework, it is a socio-technical, "human-inthe-loop" system.This paper provides an overview of barriers and bottlenecks for MDO that are driven, or at least severely affected by socio-technical factors, and propose practices to overcome these barriers and to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of ambitious MDO applications in research and industry.