Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-109). / by Ambrose Kam. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-97). / For the automotive industry, to be competitive in the market place has to devise many strategies. Some of the prominent strategies include and are not limited to, reduction of development costs by moving in-house work to its suppliers, reduction of PD cycle time by mimicking some of the industry's successful PD processes. Some companies are also devising some complex strategies like Zero-Prototype development using computer aided prototyping and testing, currently prevalent in the aerospace and naval industries, and more recently making a move into the Lean PD systems and processes to avoid waste and increase efficiency. However, to introduce such lean PD systems, with reduced PD cycle time, into a complex organization with many internally developed IT systems, processes and tools is a huge challenge. The organization needs to adapt to these lean environments not just structurally but also culturally. To design a lean PD organization (system) the decision makers have to foresee and understand how the system of systems may react to the change before they are implemented and/or executed. In the past couple of decades IT systems have been a primary enabler for PD work flow processes. / (cont.) However, IT systems are so engraved in some PD organizations that they have turned into an engineering process mechanism. Also, some of the IT systems have served more than their life expectancy and in some cases cannot be decommissioned because these systems are so tightly coupled with the business processes. An understanding of the internal system dynamics of these deeply engraved IT systems in the PD life cycle will help the automotive industry executives (decision makers) and IT systems architects to make the right decision when designing and deploying the new PD systems or processes. This study provides an overview of how IT tools have evolved in the automotive industry. Extensive research was conducted to understand the different system dynamics tools used in industry - specifically in automotive product development and the software development areas. The study concludes with an explanation of how system dynamics tools can be used as a program planning and management tool. / by Sashi K. Somavarapu. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, June 2009. / "September 2008." Title page has the copyright date of 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / Islamic Finance is a banking sector which caters to the Muslim population's banking needs by complying with the Islamic financial law. In this research some of the most prevalent financial products in Islamic Finance are surveyed and various forms of Islamic asset securitizations (Sukuks) are studied. Two issues of Islamic asset securitizations (Sukuks) are analyzed in detail. This analysis involves determining how well Sukuks serve the needs of Islamic Finance customers and also their shortcomings. In order to develop more customer-need centric financial products in Islamic Finance a new product development template is proposed. This template is a step-by-step process of developing Islamic financial products and is derived from the best practices of product development in the engineering domain. This methodology aims to formalize and improve the product development process in Islamic Finance. As an illustration of the proposed template, a new product is developed for Islamic Finance using this template. This example illustrates how religious restrictions in Islamic Finance dictate the form and substance of financial products during their development. / by Muhammad Rehan Tahir. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 81). / In this thesis I will explore the controversial topic of reverse engineering, illustrating with case examples drawn from the data storage industry. I will explore intellectual property rights issues including, users' fair-use provisions that permit reverse engineering. I will also explore the nature of the practice via several types of analyses including: the costs and benefits of reverse engineering; the practical limitations of reverse engineering; and a layered approach to reverse engineering as it applies to complex systems. I will conclude with a discussion of innovation and its relationship to reverse engineering / by Cenkhan Kodak. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-68). / Modeling credit risk using Structural and Reduced Form models has been a popular and apropos topic of research. This work makes an attempt to better understand correlations in firm default. A review of contemporary research reveals several models with varying degrees of assumptions around firm default and how they relate to macroeconomic variables. More recent literature also makes use of a doubly stochastic assumption which in essence holds that given a certain path of covariates the default probabilities of two similar firms is independent. We explore empirical evidence which points to correlated defaults conditional on various explanatory covariates. Given the strong similarities in underlying firm structure and relationship to macro-economic environment, it can be hypothesized that there exist correlations in default behavior among similar firms. / by Sreeram Thirukkonda. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-107). / The automobile industry is at a critical point in the development of in-vehicle entertainment and information features. The consumer electronics industry is changing dramatically in the areas of entertainment through audio and video playback, personal efficiency tools, and wireless communications. Equally as significant is the rapid development and feature migration that is occurring between four of the major mobile device categories; mobile phones, smart phones, PDA's, and media players. With this convergence occurring, automakers are finding it more difficult to satisfy the needs of consumers with respect to these new capabilities.In order for the automakers to establish a solution, a new framework needs to be established. The automakers are unable to satisfy this market desire through traditional technology delivery strategies, especially given the fast changing and complex interface that currently exists in this market space.This thesis establishes the framework used to identify and critically evaluate an external platform strategy for the purpose of satisfying the above need. The thesis draws upon leading literature to provide key attributes of successful external platform implementations. The first aspect of the framework established involves ensuring the need for an external platform through complexity and development clockspeed incompatibilities. The second section of the framework involves the evaluation of the architectural attributes that lead to external platform success. Finally, the stakeholders are identified and roles are established.The next phase of the analysis involves the evaluation of two prominent solution proposals using the established framework. These include the standards-based solution model that was developed at Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration (AMI-C), and the more recent commercial operating system proposal. / (cont) These proposals are evaluated to determine if a specific proposal is better suited to capture the mobility market interface in the automobile than another. The analysis and framework provided it this thesis provides a basis for further tactical evaluation by the automakers that wish to meet the needs of the mobility market. / by Kevin Baughey. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2004. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 146-149). / Design of Experiments (DoE) strategies in robust engineering determine which prototypes and how many of each are created and tested. A better strategy is one that delivers a closer-to-optimal performance at a lower experimental cost. Prototype testers who may use statistical DoE, design-build-test, or one-at-a-time methods in a wide variety of industries were sought out and interviewed to examine the strategies used in practice and how they fit into a proposed five-layer process support model. From these interviews, we see that DoE are competently and widely practiced. Some improvements to the state of the practice may include: contracts to specify and reward quality engineering among suppliers to complex product systems and wider use in light of new computing power of system level mathematical models for experimentation on complex systems. This thesis also examines the relative value of strategies in a particular response surface using a software-based comparator. The data is modified to simulate data environments with other levels of repeatability and interactions, and the way that these variables effect the performance of strategies is examined. The concept of an optimal design of experiments strategy is developed by abstracting the characteristics of a generic strategy and letting it develop in a genetic algorithm in that comparator. The framework for the evaluation of DoE strategies is one significant output to come out of this work that may be of use in future research. Further, the particular abstraction chosen for DoE strategies is offered to other researchers as an exemplar of a particular perspective, to help engender dialogue about methods for optimizing prototype testing policy. / by Ion Chalmers Freeman. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-139). / Introduction: A great part of the world today is engaged in excruciating conflicts that threaten the afflicted regions locally besides holding global peace to ransom. Most of these conflicts take the form of territorial disputes that are often protracted and sap the energies out of the nation states. Kashmir, Sudan, Israel-Palestine and Sri-Lanka today are embroiled in a bitter dispute embittered by relentless bloodshed and deep-rooted animosity carried forward through generations. The disputed regions in themselves are a mute testimony of the abject neglect of its subjects by the central ruling body (could be a democratic government! a dictator or a monarch) and failure to provide some of the important political goods across the board for a long period of time. When weighed against some of the accepted norms of development indices like the GINI index, GDP, GDP per capita, infant mortality rates, HDI index, TI index, etc one would see that the disputed regions perform quite pathetically across most of the metrics and not without a reason. Nation states exist to provide political goods to people (Ref 1). However, quite unabashedly nation-states continue its tirade against each other over a piece of land pumping huge sums of public assets that could otherwise be diverted towards development efforts depressing benefits in both the disputed territory and on the whole. Territoriality is dogma that invokes strong reactions. As per Zartman (Ref 2) a state's territory is a collective good that is equally shared by the citizens of the state. This means that the territory is indivisible and is available in the same proportion to all the citizens. It is considered to be one of the three basic components--together with people and a government--which endow a state with a sovereign moral personality universally recognized by the law and the community of nations. Till the time the territoriality is perceived as a collective good, there is no room for territorial claims to erupt. They however occur when the "national territory"--or, what the state's authorities suppose to be the "national territory"--is no longer perceived as a common good by a concerned group of citizens and becomes a "need" for this specific group. Territorial claims are about the desacralization of this territorial absoluteness. They represent iconoclastic uprisings from "politically active communal groups" determined to question the absolutely sacred dogma of the state's territorial integrity. Thus fundamentally a territorial dispute is a process of deconstruction and de-institutionalization of the nation state's order and boundaries. The focus of this thesis is to understand the epistemology of a territorial dispute and develop a framework for creating a more effective conflict resolution design. This by no means is aimed at churning out a cook book kind of a recipe to solve all the territorial disputes that afflict the world. On the contrary, this work makes an attempt to trace the path as we move from a dispute system to a resolution system by understanding the underlYing architecture. It is in fact akin to taking a step backwards and revisiting the delicate theme of territorial disputes by dissecting it deeper to peel off the layers that wrap the core problem. We use the principles of systems thinking and system architecture in understanding the intrinsic nature of a territorial dispute by treating it as a system operating in a given environment. The systems thinking paradigm allows us to view the problem in an unbiased and objective manner without getting fixated on a particular solution or a problem area. It attempts to view the conflict holistically and tries to lay threadbare the embedded structural units in the system by decomposing it into its lowest entity. The objectivity that would (in all likelihood) emerge from such an exercise may provide plausible steps to architect a resolution system design template or at least strengthen the intuitive logic of the negotiators and mediators as they grapple with the specter of a territorial dispute. In taking this view on the issue, it is indeed quite well understood that architecture of systems that are laced with social and political processes is tedious as they are highly complex and non-linear in their response. The complexity stems from the deep crosscoupling between the social, political and economic processes and the non- linearity arises out of the fact that each input in a particular realm does not necessarily elicit a proportional response. There are strong causal feedback loops that make the system response counter-intuitive too. It is beyond doubt, a sizeable challenge for a resolution system architect to pick up the gauntlet and create a simple yet creative architecture that would form the vertebral column for the design of a robust resolution system. To be able to do so one needs to clearly understand the rudiments of Systems Architecture and International Relations so as to weave a concept together. / by Rajeev Sharma. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-120). / The growing use of electronics in automobiles designs and their dependency on it, has increased the level of complexity of the car-system and created new challenges. But at the same time, it has created new opportunities and the potential to reduce complexity through modularization. This represents a new architectural paradigm for OEMs and suppliers. This thesis suggests an approach to this new era of automobiles designs. It looks at the effect of modularization and the advent of electronics on the supply chain in other industries. It evaluates the risks of value migration in the automotive industry and studies the mechanisms of such migrations through several interviews, financial data research, systems functional decomposition and system dynamics analysis. Electronics, along with software and control algorithms, enable an encapsulation of functionalities by creating higher levels of abstraction. While early vehicles had an all-mechanical interface between operator and actuation, electronics has allowed the separation of the processing of signals coming from the operator, the control/functionality infusion, the transfer of information and the transfer of energy. Thus, what was once integral has now the potential to be modular. / (cont.) Such a separation increases the modularizability of the automobile's architecture and gives it an opportunity to get closer to a lower bound "essential complexity" floor. While integrality helps prevent knowledge from fleeing away, it limits the ability to profit from various design options. When outsourcing for a modular architecture, those exclusive functionalities that actually bring value ought to be retained in-house. In particular, outsourcing software is usually not a desirable option. Software modules are likely to remain intrinsically integral for a long time to come. OEMs should thus look at expanding their software expertise in order to eliminate any dependency to an outside source for software, because it is likely a dependency on knowledge. Suppliers, who have already taken on a greater system integration responsibility, should look outside the traditional mechanical systems box. Automotive systems today involve electric, electronics and software engineering. To gain the necessary expertise in those domains, suppliers may have to perform strategic mergers & acquisitions. The role of system engineering is what OEMs ought to focus on if they want to avoid seeing value migrate to their suppliers. The emergence of value is the fruit of architecting. / (cont.) New open standards should be regarded as opportunities to become more aggressive systems architects. Open standards also allow to reduce cost, in particular by creating economies of scale and scope. However, reducing cost without creating value is the beginning of a downward spiral. Modularization and standardization have created a dynamic reaction in the industry whereby the nature of the boundaries between firms is changing and value is created and redistributed. In order to capture that value, a player has to focus on the design process, the architecting of products, rather than on the products themselves. The role of system architect in the automotive industry has evolved and now requires expertise in the field of software development, testing and integration. / Christophe L. Gaillard. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-86). / by Masatomi Inagaki. / S.M.