Managing Urban Complexity through Decision Coordination

Managing Complexity Through Selective Decoupling

Designers of complex systems are often confounded by the tendency for design changes to increase performance on some dimensions while decreasing it on others. While adopting a more modular architecture may temper these opposing effects, modularization can also deprive designers of opportunities to harness complementarities among system elements. This paper explores this tension using an NK mode...

Managing Complexity of Control Software through Concurrency

Design-to-Criteria Scheduling: Managing Complexity through Goal-Directed Satisficing

Scheduling complex problem solving tasks, where tasks are interrelated and there are multiple different ways to go about achieving a particular task, is an imprecise science and the justification for this lies soundly in the combinatorics of the scheduling problem. Intractable problems require approximate solutions. We have developed a new domainindependent approach to task scheduling called De...

Managing Complexity Through Data Integration and Information Exchange

This paper addresses two important issues in the power system monitoring and control: a.) Accurate detection, classification and characterization of faults, and b.) Reliable determination of system topology at any given time. The discussion leads to the ability to better predict the system states and dynamic operating conditions, which in turn leads to better understanding of power system opera...

Managing the Complexity of Design Problems through Studio-based Learning

The ill-structured nature of design problems makes them particularly challenging for problem-based learning. Studio-based learning (SBL), however, has much in common with problem-based learning and indeed has a long history of use in teaching students to solve design problems. The purpose of this ethnographic study of an industrial design class, an architecture class, and three human-computer-i...