Workshop on Uncertainty and Sensitivity for Design

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Intellectual Merit: A Workshop on Uncertainty and Sensitivity for Design will be held in conjunction with the ASME IMECE meeting in Seattle in November of 2007. The speakers at the workshop will be by invitation, and will comprise 20-25 scientists and engineers working in the fields of design, both of experiments and systems, and in the fields of uncertainty and sensitivity. Six keynote talks will be coupled with shorter presentations from the invited participants. Additional members of the audience will be solicited from the attendees at the IMECE. Current work in the area of verification and validation has exposed a fundamental weakness in the use of these concepts when applied to design. There is no universal agreement on what constitutes uncertainty or its related issue, sensitivity. Computational hardware and software, and their application to the fields of analysis, simulation, validation and verification are changing rapidly. Modern design is now heavily dependent upon large scale computer simulations with 'what if?' questions resolved by deterministic simulations. Unfortunately, few such analyses include the effects of uncertainty, with the result that the understanding of the role of both uncertainty and sensitivity in the design process is often sub optimal. The purpose of the workshop is to provide technical exchange, identification of the state-of-the-art, and the resolution of concepts and definitions related to the specification of design uncertainties and their related sensitivities. Broader Impacts: Design is a critical component in engineering. Essentially every accredited engineering program requires that students receive substantial instruction in the design process and in actually designing a system and evaluating the design. Since every design is subject to variability and uncertainty, students must be exposed to the associated concepts of uncertainty and sensitivity. Until the technical community can resolve the imprecision of current definitions of uncertainty and the process of evaluating sensitivity, our students are not fully educated. This workshop is a critical step is resolving the many questions about design with uncertainty.