Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-125). / The slow pace to field new defense weapon systems is allowing potential adversaries to catch up to the technological advantage the U.S. has maintained since World War 11. Despite hundreds of studies, and a near constant state of "acquisition reform", the problem continues. This research analyzed the defense acquisition process as a socio-technical system, focusing on the source selection process as subset of the Defense Acquisition System (DAS) for modeling purposes to investigate the value of the separation of contracting and program management authorities. Network graphs showed how Conway's law predicted the effect of the separation of authorities on the topographic structure of the source selection process and a high network distance between the separate authorities. An agent-based model was built that showed a 26% cost (112 days) in terms of schedule because of the separation of authorities. The benefit of the separation was investigated by scoring the comments received by the Multi-Functional Independent Review Team (MIRT) for five different source selections and found that less than 1 % of comments had a likely impact on the decision and less than 4% had a likely or highly likely impact on protestability. The results showed that while there is a small benefit to the separation of authorities currently implemented in the source selection process, the cost is very high. Enough data and evidence were generated to recommend taking steps to better structurally combine the two authorities and better integrate source selection expertise into the process. / by John M. Mehrman. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The purpose of this text is to explore the way that firms create value for customers from an experiential point of view. The experience originated from the use of products and services is conceptualized within a customer's journey to satisfy a need. The concept of experiential friction is introduced to identify possible areas of experiential improvement for customers. A framework to perform the experiential profiling of a need-satisfaction journey is provided, allowing to identify, classify, and quantify experiential inefficiencies. An experiential theory of value is proposed in which incremental value is proportional to the total experiential improvement that a customer derives from using a product or service. Lastly, the managerial implications of the ideas presented in this text are discussed. / by José Raúl Iván Garza Rodriguez. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / "June, 2018." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 56-57). / Startups are finding it increasingly difficult to engage with their target market. Particularly in the wellness industry, where there is a lot of competition and startups need to stand out, the early stages are critical. They seek to generate leads and assess customer expectations through a landing page they host on their own domains, where users can join a waitlist to test their product idea. This can become expensive in terms of budget needed for public relations and social media to promote their site. Landing pages and waitlists allow early adopters and product enthusiasts to discover new products and services while they are still being developed. Followers gained via the waitlist help to validate proof of concept, develop of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and provide a following for successful market launch and fundraising/crowdfunding campaign. However, it can be difficult to marry potential product enthusiasts with waitlists of interest because not all products are reviewed on blogs, not all social media ads target them, and not all startups are interested in crowdfunding. Existing social media platforms, blogs, forums and crowdfunding sites that showcase new products thrive because early adopters and product enthusiasts are always looking to find out the next new thing, share it with their friends and even invest. However, these platforms have limitations that make it difficult for entrepreneurs to find and engage with quality early adopters. For example, crowdfunding sites tend to cater to hardware, are limited to certain industries, and do not allow entrepreneurs to generate leads and connect with their followers on their own platform prior to hosting a crowdfunding campaign. This thesis aims to outline a business plan and minimal viable product for a waitlist aggregator, an online meeting space for entrepreneurs and early adopters in the wellness industry. Through network effects of this proposed two-sided platform, the traffic volume generated could significantly reduce the need for paid digital marketing campaigns and help entrepreneurs find quality leads. It would also inform interested consumers about new product developments all in one place, let them join the waitlist, beta-test the product and communicate directly with the company. / by Laura Y. Facussé. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-126). / The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is a large and complex organization, which employs a capability based requirements planning process. Decisions on capability requirements are made by senior military officers supported by experienced military and civilian staff with subject matter expertise. There are also many other stakeholders involved in defining concepts, identifying missing capabilities (gaps), evaluating proposed capabilities, recommending solutions to fill gaps, and developing and deploying new and improved capabilities. The process is document-driven. As each document arrives, it is reviewed and a validation decision made. The documents are then filed away. One of the problems faced by the DoD is that, while the documents are retained, the knowledge in the documents is difficult to access except by finding, reading, and analyzing the document again. Abstracting the essential information from documents and storing it as data would enable the staff to make connections from new documents filed to older documents that have related information. Understanding the interdependencies among capability requirements would enable highly informed decisions that are more cohesive with the enterprise strategy for portfolio of systems and capabilities. While there have been incremental steps by the DoD to the decision making process with document repositories and document annotations, there are ways to further improve the process to achieve a full data-enabled, capability requirements portfolio management ability. This thesis analyzes capability requirements portfolio management challenges, and presents the findings of proof of concept experiments implementing a data driven Semantic Data Lake solution to augment decision support. The data model developed in this research is a hierarchical, linked data model, derived from the specifications for document based information sources, to demonstrate the potential use cases. A semantic data model ontology was built in the Data Lake platform with a selection of realistic data, to validate that it can support the United States DoD architectures and handle the complexity of information interdependency. Semantic Data Lake accounts for discrete data and their relationships, in addition to qualitative influences to facilitate knowledge and fact representation natively. The research findings suggest that Semantic Data Lake can provide the enablers that present the United States DoD architectural information for decision making in a coherent and dynamic way, conducive to draw conclusions that can affect the outcome of the governing of capability requirements. / by Amlan Das. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-152). / This work demonstrates the effectiveness of using the concept of attributes or properties to identify, compare, and select methods for the design of aerospace systems. Growing product development cost trends for these complex systems have been alarming to the aerospace industry. To curb rising development costs by improving the product design actions that drive them, the issue is viewed from a "design system" perspective that distinguishes between the product design process - the set of tasks or problems to solve to produce a design - and the set of problem-solving techniques or methods used to complete the tasks. Support of a structured approach for designers to select their methods would help ensure that methods meeting the specific quality, budget and schedule needs of each unique design situation are utilized in a manner that is transparent to the whole design team. This thesis develops a conceptual framework for method selection decision support that combines a multi-form design process-methodology model with a general collection of attributes for characterizing any method. The model and attribute framework enable the discovery and comparison of alternative design methods relative to a given design task's requirements. The framework was validated by a case study on the early system-level conceptual design phase of a recent industry flight vehicle development program. By employing graphical and matrix modeling techniques, primary research and interviews with members of the industry design team empirically substantiated the overall efficacy of the framework, indicated four particular attributes that are especially important for comparing methods, and revealed six contextual factors that influence the attribute-based characterization of a method. / by Ephraim Chen. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Page 104 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-103). / A review of national health records (NEHR) systems shows that privacy and security risks have a profound impact on the success of such projects. Countries have different approaches when dealing with privacy and security considerations. The aims of this study were to explore how governments can design secure national health records systems. To do that systematically, we developed a framework to analyze NEHR systems. We then applied the framework to investigate the privacy and security risks in these systems. The studied systems demonstrate that getting privacy and security right have a considerable impact on the success of NEHR projects. Also, our study reveals that the healthcare system structure has a substantial impact on the adoption and usage rates of the system. The studied cases uncover many opportunities for improving privacy and security measures in future projects. The framework demonstrates the utility of applying it to the three cases. / by Ahmed S. Alawaji. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 92-99). / Blockchain technology is a peer-to-peer infrastructure based on distributed databases and smart contracts as the business logic. The distributed ledger technology eliminates the need for intermediaries disrupting the ownership model. It can have a tremendous impact on cross-organizational process automation when combined with other innovative technologies such as machine learning and additive manufacturing. Over the past few years as the blockchain technology concept has increasingly attracted many industries. The logistics and supply chain management industry have also realized its potential applications in enabling transparency, efficient information sharing, and food safety. Several companies have identified possible use cases that could benefit from blockchain over existing IT solutions. Thesis report provides an overview of current state of blockchain adoption, its technology architecture, review of how blockchain technology and smart contract works, and the benefits and challenges involved. Further, provided a deep dive into the problem of food safety, and the food supply chain and logistics ecosystem drivers. Highlighted, the current use cases of blockchain technology in supply chain and logistics along with critical success factors that companies consider essential for blockchain technology adoption. In the interviews conducted, digital innovators and senior executives are fairly positive about the blockchain technology and its benefits. However, factors such as under-developed ecosystem, lack of governance model and regulatory uncertainty impact its adoption. The proposed framework consists of a hybrid architecture of private and public blockchains, enabling immutable record sharing and monitoring while maintaining selective data privacy. / by Shweta Agarwal. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 79-81). / The space industry is experiencing rapid growth in small satellites and reusable launch vehicles. Constellations are in development to enable exciting new applications such as realtime video of the whole planet and broadband internet access provided through constellations of low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites. Existing Earth observation applications focused on observation imagery, such as weather prediction and disaster relief planning, will have improvements in the quality of their products from increased the resolution of the instruments onboard the satellites and a reduction in the time between acquisitions by using large constellations of LEO small satellites. This increasing demand for performance despite the limited budget of commercial space companies will require solutions beyond the capabilities of current electronic space products. In response to the increasing need for onboard processing, Novo Space, a STAR graduate student startup founded by the author of this thesis, is developing affordable electronic components and systems for complex LEO missions that bridge the gap between the reliability of space-grade components and the performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. This thesis focuses on architectural designs for new space applications using Novo Space ecosystem of SpaceVPX products, the result of research and analysis to meet the new space needs for high-performance space electronics. In particular, we analyze three case studies: a payload subsystem, an avionics subsystem, and a subsystem combining both avionics and payload in the same box. With the aim of furthering our understanding of the SpaceVPX standard and its potential for future space applications, a final example of a laser communication system is analyzed in greater detail. / by Rodrigo J. Diez. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Engineering, System Design and Management Program, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 23-24). / Infrastructure plays an important role in a country's economic development, it is also essential to recover from the financial crisis. The history of developed countries shows that infrastructure contributed a lot in economic development, and maintaining & upgrading infrastructure is also important for running economy smoothly. In developing countries, the quality of infrastructure and its service helps to reduce the production cost, increase the quality of personal life and gain the international competitiveness. India is the third largest country in Asia, it has developed rapidly in the recent years and became more attractive to foreign investment. Since its economic reforms in 1991, The Indian government has been committed to the development of infrastructure and encouraged private sector and foreign direct investment's participation, especially in the recent ten years. Recognizing that the lags of infrastructure development became the bottleneck of its economic growth, the Indian government increased the strength of infrastructure development by more policy and fiscal support. This paper briefly introduces the infrastructure development situation in India and attempts to analyze from infrastructure perspective the advantages and challenges that India has to sustain its economic growth. This research also compares China's rapid economic growth and infrastructure development contribution to it. In examining the successful experience that China has, and problems exposed in its infrastructure development the consequence by performing the massive stimulus financial package in 2008 points out that infrastructure development has positive impact on economic growth, and can directly contribute to the growth. There are limitations to the extent to which infrastructure development can contribute to long term economic stability. / by Shu Ma. / S.M. in Engineering and Management

Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Engineering, System Design and Management Program, February 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "February 2017." / Includes bibliographical references (page 107). / Training is the primary effort of The U.S. Army in its day to day operations. It determines the level of readiness for our nation's military. Our training is so complex it requires a system of management to match: this is referred to in Army doctrine as Training Management. Training management is a function all Army leaders perform whenever they plan, prepare, execute, and assess training. It occurs at every echelon within the Army, from teams to corps and beyond. It requires efforts in scheduling, resourcing, coordinating, and equipping to conduct training events. However, no echelon conducts training management independently. The decisions made by a brigade commander regarding training management will impact a company commander's efforts in training management. Training management can aptly be described as a complex system of complex systems. The Army Training Management System is arguably one of the most complicated systems of the U.S. military. The approach of this thesis is to aid in defining just some of the problems and challenges associated with the training management systems, to identify causes and factors that influence these issues, and to suggest potential improvements and ways to overcome these issues. This is an issue that is regularly and routinely analyzed by many military staffs and contacted civilian organizations, and by no means will this thesis provide "THE" answer-but hopefully "establish a foothold" for further analysis that leads to tangible improvements into the system. / by Michael R. Mingler. / S.M. in Engineering and Management