Collaboration in design optimization

Tacit is a software tool for designing and solving 2D truss structures. The Tacit web application expands these features to allow users to design truss structures with integrated analysis and optimization tools. Tacit was intended for single user inter- action, but much of engineering and design work is team-based and collaborative. To examine the effects of collaboration on design optimization problems, it is crucial for users to be able to easily share and view the structure designs of their teammate. This thesis presents a new version of Tacit with these collaboration features along with a new method for assessing the similarity of pairs of structures created by collaborators, and the results and analysis of a user study conducted where participants collaborated on design optimization problems with these new functionalities. Results showed that collaboration and the collaborative software tools were both effective in improving performance. The new software functionalities improved the efficiency of collaboration but unintentionally reduced the amount of physical collaboration.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Lin, Eunice, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Maria Yang.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113132

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113132