Mechanical engineering assistant professor Anand Balu Nellippallil is collaborating on a new initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that aims to support problem-solvers: He’s working on a program that can easily retrieve relevant public data, such as models and formulas, to help engineers make decisions efficiently when solving complex design problems.
The NSF granted $300,000 to the project, “Open-Source Decision Support in the Design of Engineering Systems,” through its Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, which supports organizational management by promoting collaboration and innovation. The collaborative open-source platform will empower more distributed developers and designers to perform multidisciplinary design, explore design alternatives and make informed decisions more efficiently. Users of the platform will be able to inspect, modify and enhance public data.
With this grant, Nellippallil – a co-principal investigator alongside principal investigator Lin Guo and co-principal investigator Suhao Chen, both from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology – hopes to develop a domain-independent decision support platform that can synthesize all questions an engineer may have while working through a complex problem, from designing an engine to designing software. The platform would pull public data and tools to offer relevant solutions and to make the design process more efficient.
He wants to begin developing this platform in tandem with a decision-support tool that helps engineers work through these problems. With the proposed NSF-funded platform, engineers will be able to access recommended tools and models specific to their project as they complete each step. The platform will remember each step of the process, and its recommendations will consider those steps to provide more relevant guidance.
Nellippallil hopes this collaborative technology can eventually support a wide range of industries looking to solve societal challenges, such as materials, advanced manufacturing, supply chains and national defense through the collective knowledge of researchers, educators and industry professionals.
“It will create quantitative, decision-centric linkages in digital and open-source design, advancing how such problems are approached and solved,” Nellippallil said. The researchers also hope their platform will help strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Once the platform is established, Nellippallil plans to teach his students how to use it on design problems of their own.
