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Chattopadhyay, Debarati

Publications and source records attributed to Chattopadhyay, Debarati.

7 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2021

What Makes Hybrid Concurrent Engineering Teams Work and Not Work: A Theoretical Analysis

Aerospace concurrent engineering teams (CETs) have been around since 1995 and have evolved into various shapes and forms. Historically, CETs have been designed to function with all team members physically collocated. In order to continue operating during the coronavirus pandemic, these teams have had to become fully distributed in 2020. Previously, distributed CETs were predicted to be considerably less efficient than traditional CETs. However, at JPL studies are being successfully run at peak rate in a distributed mode. As nominal working conditions resume after the pandemic, a major question is whether these teams must go back to being fully collocated or if they can become successful hybrid teams, with half or more of the engineers working remotely. In order to address this question, it is important to understand the key characteristics that make a CET more likely to be successful in a remote mode. This paper revisits a framework for characterizing concurrent engineering teams, providing a means to describe and compare the behavior of concurrent engineering teams in various settings [1], and uses the framework to make recommendations for future hybrid teams.

Chattopadhyay, Debarati↗
NASA NTRS2011

Aerospace Concurrent Engineering Design Teams: Current State, Next Steps and a Vision for the Future

Over the past sixteen years, government aerospace agencies and aerospace industry have developed and evolved operational concurrent design teams to create novel spaceflight mission concepts and designs. These capabilities and teams, however, have evolved largely independently. In today's environment of increasingly complex missions with limited budgets it is becoming readily apparent that both implementing organizations and today's concurrent engineering teams will need to interact more often than they have in the past. This will require significant changes in the current state of practice. This paper documents the findings from a concurrent engineering workshop held in August 2010 to identify the key near term improvement areas for concurrent engineering capabilities and challenges to the long-term advancement of concurrent engineering practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of a proposed vision for the evolution of these teams over the next decade.

concurrent engineering design↗
NASA NTRS2011

Characterizing Distributed Concurrent Engineering Teams: A Descriptive Framework for Aerospace Concurrent Engineering Design Teams

As aerospace missions grow larger and more technically complex in the face of ever tighter budgets, it will become increasingly important to use concurrent engineering methods in the development of early conceptual designs because of their ability to facilitate rapid assessments and trades in a cost-efficient manner. To successfully accomplish these complex missions with limited funding, it is also essential to effectively leverage the strengths of individuals and teams across government, industry, academia, and international agencies by increased cooperation between organizations. As a result, the existing concurrent engineering teams will need to increasingly engage in distributed collaborative concurrent design. This paper is an extension of a recent white paper written by the Concurrent Engineering Working Group, which details the unique challenges of distributed collaborative concurrent engineering. This paper includes a short history of aerospace concurrent engineering, and defines the terms 'concurrent', 'collaborative' and 'distributed' in the context of aerospace concurrent engineering. In addition, a model for the levels of complexity of concurrent engineering teams is presented to provide a way to conceptualize information and data flow within these types of teams.

Concept Design↗
NASA NTRS2011

Concurrent Engineering Working Group White Paper Distributed Collaborative Design: The Next Step in Aerospace Concurrent Engineering

As aerospace missions grow larger and more technically complex in the face of ever tighter budgets, it will become increasingly important to use concurrent engineering methods in the development of early conceptual designs because of their ability to facilitate rapid assessments and trades of performance, cost and schedule. To successfully accomplish these complex missions with limited funding, it is essential to effectively leverage the strengths of individuals and teams across government, industry, academia, and international agencies by increased cooperation between organizations. As a result, the existing concurrent engineering teams will need to increasingly engage in distributed collaborative concurrent design. The purpose of this white paper is to identify a near-term vision for the future of distributed collaborative concurrent engineering design for aerospace missions as well as discuss the challenges to achieving that vision. The white paper also documents the advantages of creating a working group to investigate how to engage the expertise of different teams in joint design sessions while enabling organizations to maintain their organizations competitive advantage.

Hihn, Jairus↗
NASA NTRS2010

Identification and Classification of Common Risks in Space Science Missions

Due to the highly constrained schedules and budgets that NASA missions must contend with, the identification and management of cost, schedule and risks in the earliest stages of the lifecycle is critical. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) it is the concurrent engineering teams that first address these items in a systematic manner. Foremost of these concurrent engineering teams is Team X. Started in 1995, Team X has carried out over 1000 studies, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved, and has been the model for other concurrent engineering teams both within NASA and throughout the larger aerospace community. The ability to do integrated risk identification and assessment was first introduced into Team X in 2001. Since that time the mission risks identified in each study have been kept in a database. In this paper we will describe how the Team X risk process is evolving highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. The paper will especially focus on the identification and classification of common risks that have arisen during Team X studies of space based science missions.

Risk Identification↗
NASA NTRS2010

Risk Identification and Visualization in a Concurrent Engineering Team Environment

Incorporating risk assessment into the dynamic environment of a concurrent engineering team requires rapid response and adaptation. Generating consistent risk lists with inputs from all the relevant subsystems and presenting the results clearly to the stakeholders in a concurrent engineering environment is difficult because of the speed with which decisions are made. In this paper we describe the various approaches and techniques that have been explored for the point designs of JPL's Team X and the Trade Space Studies of the Rapid Mission Architecture Team. The paper will also focus on the issues of the misuse of categorical and ordinal data that keep arising within current engineering risk approaches and also in the applied risk literature.

Risk Scoring↗