Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 73 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (page 72). / Sugar mills produce a range of by-products during the sugar extraction process. Bagasse, press-mud (also known as filter cake or mill mud), molasses and alcohol by-products are commonly used for various purposes. Specifically, press-mud, one of the by-products is produced in significant volume. Some of this press-mud is utilized by farmers as fertilizer. However, the supply of press-mud often exceeds the demand leading to stockpiling onsite or spreading it over nearby cane fields as a disposal method. Subsequently, the heavy metal contamination and over-fertilization of cane fields and spillage to nearby waterways due to excess press-mud has raised serious environmental concerns. This study takes a look at a possible method to mitigate air, water and health pollution from sugar manufacturing in India by converting the excess press-mud generated into Biofuel. This operation not only mitigates pollution, but also opens up an income stream for small to large scale sugar mill enterprises in a nascent but promising market in India. Systems thinking methods that we use in this study to examine the Biofuel solution to excess press-mud generation show several benefits to local community, local sugar mill facility owners as well as external constituents. These benefits include higher quality of living through a cleaner environment, enhanced employment opportunities and local access to fuel, which in turn lowers dependence on costly energy imports. / by Leena Ratnam. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in System Design and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-122). / The current global economic recession is putting pressure to increase model variation on the car makers, while at the same time leveraging highly efficient and proven platforms and product development assets globally is becoming critical. In order to be competitive, OEMs would prefer to use their low cost country branches that have competitive. engineering capabilities to reduce costs of development. It is then important that the organizations in these countries have a well defined process and the expertise to effectively interact with the OEM headquarters where the executive decision makers reside; and with the Design Studio, the entity in charge of designing the appearance of the reverse-engineered components. This thesis develops such a process from study of the necessary requirements, construction of a DSM and consideration of past attempts at programs where engineering and studio design were not co-located. The process to engineer a vehicle exterior and interior is called the feasibility process. In the OEM under investigation, this method is conducted at a component level to leverage the detailed expertise of its Engineering department and suppliers. This is done after several styling options are studied and research through customer clinics to narrow the number of designs that are made feasible to Engineering to normally one. This approach leads to several iterations when each component changes and affects others or the overall system performance. In order to integrate all feasibility changes and achieve styling intent, Engineering must communicate the constraints and Design Studio must understand them and re-style the appearance to accomplish the functional performance. Upon analysis of the OEM engineered functional teams and the components that strongly affect appearance the key sub-system expertise is defined for low cost countries to develop knowledge on them. In addition, from construction of a DSM, we were able to clearly identify the Design Studio intensive process loop and the concurrent engineering loop within the product development process. Moreover, the information transfer interfaces were clearly recognized. These interfaces were reviewed in former distant interaction projects and showed additional workload in the preparation of information prior to the communication process, while in co-located projects, this happens in real time while and where communication takes place. Nevertheless, awareness of the component changes helps Design Engineers to be aware of the system implication of the change and reduce the amount of iterations by addressing them prior to Engineering cut-off, to allow the Design Studio to focus only on the appearance of the integrated system. In the same way, Design Engineering helps the Design Studio to assess additional surface changes to achieve surface quality before surfaces are released to Engineering. Therefore Design Engineering must be co-located at both ends: where Engineering is preparing functional information and where the Studio prepares styling information. The resulting spoke and hub model, establishes the Design Engineer as the single point of contact for daily interaction. Conference calls and virtual tools have been very useful for the day-to-day communication, however scheduled and periodical face-to-face meetings between distant the Design Engineering teams has been proven to provide good results to enhance team identity, convey priorities and clarify difficult issues. This approach has been used formerly in several past programs, yet all of them have been conducted with a US based Design Studio and an overseas Engineering team. The product development process used in these projects was not the one normally used by the US OEM but that of its Japanese Partner Company, which is more disciplined in terms of surface changes. This forces Engineering to front-load the process to address not only component but also system level problems. Similarly, late styling changes are kept to a minimum to avoid unplanned iterations of component, relational and pure design feasibility. One important enabler to reduce the required interaction and thus eliminate lengthy and noisy communication is to re-use legacy program information by leveraging platform knowledge. Since platforms are initially launched designing a base tophat, it is important to update such information after the design is verified and re-use it as well as those resources that generated and that understand the system's performance. This approach will improve platform level quality and time to provide feasibility for every platform's tophat. Models are important tools for the Studio to understand the overall integration of surfaces and the clarification of the idea "is it really what I think it is?" by allowing the designers to understand proportion and shape in a physical model as well as the real integration of surfaces continuity through daylight revisions prior to tooling kick-off. Additionally it is an important aid to convey a lot of information implicit in the surfaces to the top management of the OEM showing the status of the latest feasible design for which cost and quality targets are recognized. Nonetheless, models are also important for engineers to understand part transitions, radii grain execution and several other details that may not impact functionality but are essential for leadership in craftsmanship. This is why engineers must have access to a detailed model that accurately represents Design Studio's vision on the execution of such details. / by Antonio del Puerto Valdez. / S.M.in System Design and Management

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-109). / Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a promising renewable energy technology to generate electricity and has other applications such as production of freshwater, seawater air-conditioning, marine culture and chilled-soil agriculture. Previous studies on the technology have focused on promoting it to generate electricity and produce energy-intensive products such as ammonia and hydrogen. Though the technology has been understood in the past couple of decades through academic studies and limited demonstration projects, the uncertainty around the financial viability of a large-scale plant and the lack of an operational demonstration project have delayed large investments in the technology. This study brings together a broad overview of the technology, market locations, technical and economic assessment of the technology, environmental impact of the technology and a comparison of the levelized costs of energy of this technology with competing ones. It also provides an analysis and discussion on application of this technology in water scarce regions of the world, emphasized with a case study of the economic feasibility of this technology for the Bahamas. It was found that current technology exists to build OTEC plants except for some components such as the cold water pipe which presents an engineering challenge when scaled for large-scale power output. The technology is capital intensive and unviable at small scale of power output but can become viable when approached as a sustainable integrated solution to co-generate electricity and freshwater, especially for island nations in the OTEC resource zones with supply constraints on both these commodities. To succeed, this technology requires the support of appropriate government regulation and innovative financing models to mitigate risks associated with the huge upfront investment costs. If the viability of this technology can be improved by integrating the production of by-products, OTEC can be an important means of producing more electricity, freshwater and food for the planet's increasing population. / by Shylesh Muralidharan. / S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in System Design and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2010. / Vita. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-121) and index. / Summary: The warning bells are ringing. Once a global auto giant with a gold-plated reputation for safety and reliability, Toyota has stumbled. Its engineering excellence and traditional craftsmanship are being watered down by years of nips and tucks. With a torrent of high-profile recalls at the beginning of the new decade and a series of highly publicized legal charges, Toyota is all over the headlines. Following a business strategy that sacrifices its customer-first focus but in favor of driving shareholder value, Toyota gradually has shifted away from the tenet of lean manufacturing. Seeking cost leadership and market leadership has gone too far, and differentiation through quality, reliability and fuel efficiency becomes blurred. The execution of such business strategy in the past few years has lured Toyota to rush into relationships with suppliers it has not adequately vetted and to apply questionable security measures as it sourced parts from all around the world. In so doing, Toyota has been constantly adding stress to the security of its supply chain. In the end, its risk mitigation capability does not improve and quality standards have lapsed. Globalization and commoditization have forced today's businesses to focus on cost-cutting and growth to achieve profits of struggle to survive. Consequently, offshoring and outsourcing have become common practice. In such a competitive environment, supply chain is the lifeblood of a business and supply chain security is well-recognized as a competitive advantage and even a marketing tool. Security Secure supply chain is critical in product quality assurance and combating counterfeit, for which authoritative product attribute service represents an urgent need. For a long time, product attribute service is considered a Business-to-Business application. Trading partners of a supply chain build and share product information amongst themselves. Consumers are basically excluded from accessing such information. On the other hand, typically, product information provided to the end consumers are maintained by individual retailers. Such an approach is heterogeneous, error-prone, inaccurate, incomplete, and it undermines consumer confidence. There is a gap for authoritative product attribute service (APAS) that can provide uniform, validated, timely and complete product info to the end consumers. With APAS, consumers will play an active role in monitoring and contributing to the security of the supply chain. With a mobile barcode scanner or mobile RFID reader in hand, consumers will become a vibrant force in combating counterfeits, detecting 'bogus' status and reducing illegal trade. Consumers will benefit from such new capability by protecting their rights to buy genuine products with correct status and through legitimate channels. In addition, a spectrum of important mobile commerce applications will be made possible, such as trustful product attributes retrieval, attribute-based product search and comparison, product rating and commenting. With APAS, brand owners and other supply chain partners will see unprecedented possibilities such as direct customer-facing product marketing e.g. product recommendation, individualized coupon promotion, as well as direct user feedback on feature request and defect report. All of this will allow them to build competitive advantages with shorter user interaction cycles, more fragile to user demand variation, targeted and efficient product design, responsive product recall, and more effective in attacking counterfeits. In this thesis, I strive to provide a timely in-depth analysis on the mechanisms behind Toyota's crisis, especially the linkage between business strategy and supply chain security. I will relate secure supply chain to competitive advantage, and authoritative product attribute service to secure supply chain. Based on this, I perform strategic analysis and propose an architectural design for product attribute service. As a proof of concept, I design and implement a prototype of APAS with decent size of APAS repository and support for both mobile and PC clients. To this end, I first formulate the problems and explain the motivations behind secure supply chain and product attribute service. I then give an overview of the journey of Toyota from the synonym of quality to the reminder for product recalls. To provide further more background knowledge, I will examine business strategy and competitive advantage, together with secure supply chain, in the following two chapters. In particular, I will be deliberating on the causality between business strategy and supply chain strategy, and how supply chain vision and strategy can lead to operational executions that are sources of QA crises. In the next section, I provide details on architectural design for Authoritative Product Attribute Service. Afterwards, I describe the prototyping and implementation of APAS that covers the backend product attribute repository, the web backend that powers the APAS, as well as the Android-based mobile frontend. Finally, I summarize with concluding remarks and outline directions for future research. / by Xiaoyuan Gu. / S.M.in System Design and Management

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-217). / The history of acquisition reform dates back to the Revolutionary War era, and recommendations and actions to reform the Department of Defense's acquisition system continue today. Common themes emerge from the recommendations of countless Acts, Studies, Panels, and Commissions over the past 30 years, pointing to areas that appear to have the most impact on the system. Despite these actions and recommendations, issues remain at the program execution level, resulting in increased cost and delays in fielding needed capabilities. This work focuses on three areas. A comprehensive Literature Review of acquisition reform activities was conducted. This generated a list of common themes and focus areas that are associated with less than successful program outcomes. Following this, a series of ten patterns of behavior (acquisition archetypes) postulated for software programs developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute were examined for applicability to the larger Department of Defense acquisition system and to determine their relationship to acquisition reform actions. As part of this effort, a survey of acquisition personnel was conducted to determine the relevance of these patterns of behavior. Based on these foundational works, the final step examined the results of the survey to answer four research questions. First, the survey results were analyzed to determine if the patterns of behavior were present with general and statistical relevance. The second question attempted to determine if the patterns of behavior led to measurable cost and/or schedule growth if they were present in the respondent's program. Third, the postulated root causes for the behaviors were compared to the common themes from acquisition reform activities to determine alignment. Finally, the survey results were analyzed to see if the patterns of behavior correlated to a particular program size, lead service, or "joint" program status. The findings show that the patterns of behavior are present in Department of Defense acquisition programs, and some do lead to measurable cost and/or schedule growth when identified. Acquisition Reform activities have been targeted at the areas that are reported as root causes of the behaviors, and one of the ten patterns of behavior does correlate with "joint" program status. / by Gregory J. McNew. / S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-97). / In slow or no-growth economies, firms cannot rely solely on recurring business from large, core customers who often delay or cancel capital investments in belt-tightening times. To achieve growth, firms must lever domain knowledge to expand business markets to find new customers. A core method to accomplish this expansion is through service models that can provide recurring revenues without as much up-front investment for customers. However, in a product-centric firm, the process of transforming a product into a service can be complex, and is the motivation for this research. No other complete explanation of this process has been published to date. The goal of researching this process is to give direction to managers who are considering transforming a product into service. The research led to building a service model using the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) Radar System as its subject. The CASA Radar System is an X-Band Phased-Array Radar used for weather forecasting and environmental warning, led by University of Massachusetts with the assistance from several universities and industry partners. The radar system provides capabilities that did not exist previously in larger and less price effective systems, but was only available to be acquired directly, for upwards of $600 million. The CASA model sought to show how transforming the radar system from a product to a service could create value for the UMASS led team by selling more systems in a new service model to new customers, including weather-sensing firms and non-profits that want access to the CASA Radar System and would even pay for it, but were unable to support its standard capital costs. / by Benjamin Levitt. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-104). / Government agencies characteristically face dynamic policy and investment environments yet frequently rely on ad-hoc decision-making methods in response to complexities inherent in their operating landscape. Additionally, standard decision making methods typically undervalue projects by ignoring difficult to value, non-monetary benefits. This presents a problem for public institutions, such as the Department of Energy (DOE), where goals relating to the environment and national security are difficult to quantify. As a result, it is especially challenging to accurately optimize the use of public funds. The Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for making significant investment decisions under extreme uncertainty with respect to the nation's public energy portfolio. Recently, leaders internal and external to the government have called for a comprehensive and structured approach to assess the DOE's portfolio of programs and initiatives (PCAST, 2010), (American Energy Innovation Council, 2011). Given the broad spectrum of the DOE's current portfolio, from basic R&D to demonstration and across every major energy technology, evaluating the impacts of its potential investments is complex. Within the Department of Energy's Planning Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) team, a proposal was made to develop a first-of-a-kind decision tool that would provide rigorous analysis of cost and benefit trade-offs associated with the DOE's investments. The decision tool was designed to couple a state-of-the-art climate and energy model with sophisticated multi-attribute-based decision methods. The research described in this thesis illuminates the advantages and shortcomings of the initial decision tool structure, and presents a second generation model that is tailored to the DOE's operational context. Finally, in order to expand its use for long-range strategy formation, an evolution of this second generation model is explored through the application of recent theoretical methodologies. The resulting decision tool is intended to play an informative role within a comprehensive portfolio review by enabling the enumeration of budgetary trade-offs that address high-level, strategy questions facing the DOE. / by Kacy J. Gerst. / S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 118-121). / The United States Army is entering a period of strategic reset after more than a decade of intense combat operations. One of the most critical areas of this reset is ensuring the health and discipline of the force remains intact. There are factors, both health and discipline, which drive high-risk behaviors by soldiers. Therefore it is critical to understand if the system is adequately structured in order adequately prepare leaders to not only ensure soldiers complete their work functions, but also maintain a healthy personal life. Leadership and solder welfare systems are the primary drivers of this research. The research explores how leaders ensure soldier well-being in a garrison environment and identifies some of the structural causes for the difficulties in achieving this. It attempts to holistically analyze both how the system is designed, but also its implementation and the properties which emerge from it. The research first outlines Army doctrine to establish the baseline for how the Army operates. Next, it identifies a series of policies and processes which relate directly to soldier welfare to identify the structure in which leaders operate. At the same time this develops the framework to identify how the system operates through a series of interviews with leaders at the company level in order identify the perspective of leaders at the company level and some of the emergent behaviors which evolve from the design of the system. In conclusion, this research determines that a multi-leveled approach must be taken. Senior leaders must ensure the system is designed to foster the development of leaders and provides flexibility to these leaders. Leaders at the company level must not only prioritize short-term operational goals, but also invest in people for the long-term viability of the Army. / by Stephen J. Sapol. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 45). / Three persistent common problems in satellite ground control software used by satellite controllers are obsolescence, lack of desired features and flexibilities, and endless software bug fixing. The obsolescence problem occurs when computer and ground equipment hardware become obsolete usually after only one third into the satellite mission lifetime. The satellite ground control software needs to be updated to accommodate changes on the hardware side, requiring significant work of satellite operators to test, verify, and validate these software updates. Software updates can also result from a new software version that offers new features or just fixes some bugs. Trying to help solve these problems, an OPM model and guidelines for developing satellite ground control software have been proposed. The system makes use of a database-driven application and concepts of object-process orientation and modularity. In the new proposed framework, instead of coding each software function separately, the common base functions will be coded, and combining them in various ways will provide the different required functions. The formation and combination of these base functions will be governed by the main code, definitions, and database parameters. These design principles will make sure that the new software framework would provide satellite operators with the flexibility to create new features, and enable software developer to find bugs quicker and fix them more effectively. / by Somwang Thipphayathetthana. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, System Design and Management Program, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 72-78). / Akamai, a high tech company based in Cambridge Massachusetts, is a market leader in global Content Delivery Network (CDN) industry. To fully leverage opportunities and also tackle challenges in market, the company has been keeping innovating new products and providing new services to keep existing customers while attracting new ones. One of company's strategic plans is to extend company's current products and services into an industry platform, such that Akamai can leverage other companies' resources to better serve broader customer base to achieve sustainable growth. One product identified by the company that has the potential to be extended into industry platform is called Cloudlet. Cloudlet is a series of new applications launched by Akamai in 2014. Those applications aim to solve business and operational challenges that customers have but do not belong to traditional CDN services. The research topic of this thesis is to develop platform strategies that could extend Cloudlet into a platform. To achieve this goal, the writer started with reviewing related literatures and identified existing frameworks to conduct systematic analysis on challenges the company may encounter in different aspects. Also, the writer gained first hand experience by working in Cloudlet product management team and initiated a series of interviews with different stakeholders inside the company for different perspectives. Also the writer has conducted two case studies regarding successful cloud services to identify best practices that Cloudlet team inside Akamai can leverage. Finally, a list of strategic actions is proposed for Cloudlet platform transformation with analysis on how these actions can best attract customers and motivate stakeholders internally and externally. / by Ming Jiang. / S.M. in Engineering and Management