Integrating the best tools and methods from traditional design practices, with the collaborative engineering paradigms that are being made possible by modern information technologies. Developing the scientific bases for the syntheses of complex systems, as well as the analyses of individual components, in order to support effective exploration systems and product developments in the aerospace/mechanical, biomedical and other industries.

Design and manufacturing is the core of the engineering profession in modern industry and plays an important role in economic development and wealth creation in our society. The design and manufacturing industry worldwide has gone through several major revolutions during the 20th century in responding to the rapidly changing technological and social demands. On the technology side, the productivity competition expanded from materials and machines of unit processes to include products and services of integrated systems. At the social front, focus on automation to reduce production costs is being subsumed by the environmental and life cycle concerns for sustainable production. Information technologies (IT), which have triggered the 3rd industrial revolution, further hasten, deepen and widen these revolutions, fundamentally shaping the ways we design, produce, market, serve and recycle industrial products in the future. As we move into the 21st century, the design and manufacturing industry will be based on very different paradigms than those that were familiar to us in the past.

The research and education programs in Science and Technology of the Design and Manufacturing of Complex Systems at AME aim at the creation of fundamental new knowledge that can lead to improved industry practices to meet the above challenge. Compared with design and manufacturing activities at other universities, our programs at AME have several unique characteristics as follows:

• System engineering approaches to address life-cycle issues in product development, ranging from innovative materials to collaborative design;
• IT-based theories, methods and tools to establish the needed collaborative technology infrastructure for distributed product developments;
• Complex system design experiences and practices from industry experts to guide the research agenda and to deploy research results.

Faculty Research Interest Clusters associated with the Design and Manufacturing Theme are:

• Aerodynamics
• Astronautics
• Computational Engineering and Information Technology
• Combustion and Heat Transfer
• Design and Manufacturing
• Dynamical Systems and Controls
• High-Performance Advanced Materials
• Nano-, Micro-, and Meso-Scale Science and Devices
• Solid and Applied Mechanics

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