Drs. Georges Fadel, Gregory Mocko, and Joshua Summers contributed to a chapter in “Impact of Design Research on Industrial Practice“. The book was published by Springer and edited by Amaresh Chakrabarti and Udo Lindemann.
Overview of chapter:
This chapter summarizes many years of design research at Clemson University and their impact on industrial practice. It shows how various ideas percolated, were developed and eventually made their ways to become used in industry. In design research, a broad area of endeavor, design theories take the longest to develop and are the slowest to transition to industry. The development of methods, practices, and their applications to industrial problems are much quicker to transfer, however, since industry sees immediately the potential benefits or shortcomings of the methods on the issues that interest them. Finally, the training of students at all levels in design practice certainly impacts industry since many become employed and affect the practices of their companies.
Drs. Georges Fadel, Mechanical Engineering, and Margaret Wiecek, Mathematical Sciences, contributed to a chapter in “Optimized Packings with Applications“. The book was published by Springer and edited by Giorgio Fasano and János D. Pintér.
Overview of chapter:
Packing for engineering design involves the development and use of methods to determine the arrangement of a set of subsystems or components within some enclosure to achieve a set of objectives without violating spatial or performance constraints. Packing problems, also known as layout optimization problems are challenging because they are highly multimodal, are characterized by models that lack closed-form representations, and require expensive computational procedures. The time needed to resolve intersection calculations increases exponentially with the number of objects to be packed while the space available for the placement of these components becomes less and less available. This Chapter presents the multiyear research effort by Professors Fadel and Wiecek, targeting the development of computational tools for packing optimization problems which are encountered at different stages of engineering design with special interest in automotive design. Due to increasingly realistic engineering applications, the problems feature a rising level of complexity and therefore require optimization models and approaches with growing sophistication. To be relevant to automotive design, the packing problems account for the free shape of objects and consider either their compact packing within an envelope or their noncompact packing in the presence of multiple criteria used to evaluate system performance. The packing problems are represented by single or multiobjective optimization problems while the solution approaches rely on evolutionary algorithms due to the level of complexity that precludes development of effective exact methods.
