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In 2021 GW Engineering was awarded funding to launch an interdisciplinary program on trustworthy AI. Designing Trustworthy AI in Systems (or DTAIS) brings together PhD students from systems engineering and computer science to co-design research and tackle the conceptual and methodological bridge building that cross disciplinary work demands. This paper focuses on how this work has been accomplished thus far, in the context of the cornerstone summer incubator, and shares some of the lessons learned. The 10-week summer incubator course, which was designed specifically for this program, brings systems engineers and computer science PhD students to make sense of “AI in the wild” (real world settings) and build short-run research prototypes together. Leveraging the interdisciplinarity of the core program faculty, the group established a fertile middle ground where a mixed method ethos, design sprint rhythm and intentional sense of community enlivens the normative student-advisor modality most PhD students experience. Along the way, the definitional challenge of what is meant exactly by trust and trustworthiness within a particular problem domain and literature is given plenty of room to form, fall apart and form again through discussion, practice, and reflection. With two iterations of the summer incubator course to glean from, we report on the difficulties of rewiring student-advisor dynamics and the positive effects of growing a diverse community. This represents a potential roadmap for how to scaffold interdisciplinarity in engineering doctoral education. 

Through an examination of three cases of change in the U-2 platform, this paper compares three pathways to changeability: form changes, operational changes, and cyber changes. Each pathway can lead to change in similar properties of a system but have varying levels of performance and time to implement. For each pathway, we describe the design mechanisms necessary to implement change in that pathway. We analyze the trade-off between performance or extent of change and agility or speed of change and find that form changes offer the highest degree of changeability but take the longest time to implement. Operational changes offer the least degree of changeability but are far quicker to implement. Cyber changes lie in between these two pathways. Understanding the design choices needed and the underlying trade-off of each pathway can enable decision-makers to better select a pathway to change when the need arises. This comparative analysis is especially useful since literature has thus far examined each of these pathways in isolation, not as different paths to the same goal. 

Systems engineering has often concerned itself with how operator and customer roles change when systems change. In the context of automated vehicles (AVs), it has been assumed that operators will be removed from the system architecture; however, new insights reveal that the role of operators, typically thought of as drivers, has been transformed, not eliminated. In this study, we identify how different types of door-to-door transportation services use varying organizational architectures to achieve required functions, and explore how these architectures might this change with emergence of automated door-to-door transportation services. We draw on prior research, archival documents, and semi-structured interviews with AV technical and operational experts to identify and detail required functions for these services. Preliminary results reveal that, counter to the commonly-held belief, the structures of commercial AV services more closely parallel traditional taxi organizations rather than current ride-hailing services based on their capital cost and human labor requirements. Future research will explore short and long-term development pathways for AV systems and their associated structural and functional requirements. While the structures of these AV companies will continue to develop alongside the automation technologies, early explorations of AV organizations can reveal multiple possible development pathways for AV services and highlight potentially desirable or undesirable intermediary stages. 

Abstract Standardized design approaches such as those embodied by concurrent design facilities have many benefits, such as increased efficiency of the design process, but may also have hidden costs. Specifically, when their standardized organizational decomposition is a poor fit for the particular design problem, important design trades might be missed or poor decisions made. Before we can understand how this lack of fit impacts the design process, we must be able to empirically observe and measure it. To that end, this paper identifies measures of “fit” from the literature along with attributes likely to impact design process performance, then evaluates the measures to determine how well the measures can detect and diagnose potential issues. The results provide comparative insights into the capabilities of existing fit measures, and also build guidance for how the systems engineering and design community can use insights from the “fit” literature to inform process improvement. 

Complex engineered systems with long life cycles can expect to face operational uncertainty. Two common approaches to maintain system performance in an uncertain operating environment are flexibility, where the system is designed to change easily in response to a change in the operating environment and robustness, where the system is designed to sustain performance despite change. Prior work has examined how to design systems to be either flexible or robust, but so far this work largely assumes that these strategies are implemented during the design phase and that designers know the possible changes that the system will face. However, in practice, many systems face unforeseeable needs and must be modified to sustain value post-production. Through an inductive case study, this paper examines that process: documenting how aircraft were modified post-production to gain new capabilities for close air support in Operation Desert Storm. Consistent with prior studies, it finds that new capabilities can be gained through both changes to form and changes to tactics. Extending this line of work, this study examines the conditions under which each type of change is effective. Additionally, it highlights an important interaction between form and tactical changes that has not been well defined in existing literature.