Use of space analog missions as an educational tool in primary schools

Space exploration is a field that inspires a wide range of people, from children to university students, including the general public. With a return to the Moon planned for 2024 and the rapid expansion of the private industry, educating the next generation for this challenge becomes a priority. As many interdisciplinary programmes in universities are developed, the increasing interest in do-it-yourself projects can be observed. In addition, nothing inspires children more than the wish of becoming astronauts. By combining these two previously stated themes, space analog missions, simulations of life on another celestial body, were used as an educational tool for children, in our case in a primary school.In the frame of an EPFL semester project, such a program was run at the Vivalys primary school in Switzerland. A class of 16 children between the age of 6 and 9 successfully designed and conducted a simulated Mars-based mission from September 2020 to March 2021, in spite of the difficult COVID situation. The Vivalys Mission has been entirely integrated to the school year's program by adapting the educational subjects (mathematics, sci-ences, geography, French, sports, history, and arts), attending workshops, and performing hands-on experiments. Systems engineering approaches were adopted allowing the class to acquire knowledge regarding stakeholder analysis, risk management and decision tools. The young team made mission design choices and presented them to experts during reviews. Leadership, teamwork and autonomy were demonstrated and practiced. This tool is innovative: a do-it-yourself approach combined with education and practical work.The educational impact was studied using assessment strategies such as evaluations, rubrics and personal interviews. The progress and skills acquired, as well as their increasing will to work in the space field, were highlighted in the results. Following the success of this program, the local primary schools showed interest in running a similar project. Thanks to this first case study, lessons learned such as adapting the curriculum, organizing exterior activities, and enhancing the participation of adults, were collected.This is the first step towards impacting different age groups, starting in pre-school right up to secondary education. The success of our study underlines the current need and enthusiasm for such projects and will be further developed in the upcoming years becoming easily accessible to schools across Switzerland and the world, also through the promotion at IAC.

Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering of Passenger Train Operational Design

The Railway industry is facing a productivity issue as is often publicised with regular delays in rolling stock projects [1]. Plus, there is a growing need for innovation in remote services and management that have become the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic. It drives a need for better Systems Engineering (SE) methods which include increased automation and dependence between systems and system performance, increasing number of disparate specialist engineering teams. [2] The aim of this paper is to develop an adaptable model which expresses the operational behavior of a train system in different railway environments, this model will be quickly and accurately configured to a specific environment to define the needs for a specific passenger service mission. Preventing late changes (cost and time-saving) by generating the right system requirements at the very early design phase through agile Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach is the key benefit. Another goal includes increased productivity by minimizing unnecessary manual transcription of concepts when coordinating the work of large teams. This Generic* functional model of a Rolling Stock system can be configured to define specific products for an operator or Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM).

Adapting a STEM Robotics Program to the Covid-19 Pandemic - a validation of the proposal presented at ISEC in 2021

In late 2020 the hosts of the IEEE Robot Challenge, a STEaM project requiring close teamwork among high school and middle school students, realized that it would not be able to comply with the COVID-19 restrictions that would likely be in place in early 2021. The project, originally developed by the IEEE Baltimore Section for the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) as part of their Maryland Engineering Challenges program (MEC), would need to be modified significantly, yet it had to maintain a high level of teamwork (now likely to be on-line), and a comparable level of 'challenge' to the earlier in-person version generally held at the BMI. The 3 phases of the Challenge event as well as the robots themselves, would need to be re-designed, and there would be little time for mistakes or rework, as all details of the project would need to perform correctly the first (and possibly only) time they would be used. With the assistance of a group of Systems Engineers, all steps were analyzed and evaluated for their effectiveness and reliability, and on May 25, 2021, the Challenge was held using Zoom as the controlling system. The methodology that we planned to employ was outlined in a paper with this name that was presented at the 2021 ISEC conference [1]. The purpose of this 2022 paper is to measure and evaluate the success of the systems engineering studies and how they could be applied to other projects. Unexpectedly, Covid 19 is still with us, so the Virtual Challenge will again be offered for the April 23, 2022 event, though an 'in-person' Challenge will also be available on another day. © 2022 IEEE.

A Study on the Impact of COVID-19 Epidemic on Civil Engineering System

In 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic broke out and since then civil engineering systems all over the world have been deeply influenced. The epidemic prevention policies directly made most of conventional works not feasible and new ways of working for civil system are needed like telecommuting and other remote technologies. In this paper, the approaches of system engineering are used to divide normal civil engineering system into many phases from the perspective of civil system development and list impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on each phase. The system analysis make us have a more comprehensive understanding of the problem in civil system and make it possible to optimize a specific phase in more targeted way. Moreover, in this way, we can not only comprehend the characteristics of every phase, but also clarify the relationships between them. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Semantic Text Analysis To Determine The Positive Index Of The Ufpso Systems Engineering Program

This research presents a semantic analysis of text, based on the Systems Engineering program at the Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander Ocaña, with the purpose of knowing the index of positive mentions of the messages offered on the web page of the university and the respective program, and that due to online enrollment become the reference information for applicants to enter the program. Five factors were measured: Mission, Vision, Objectives, Professional Profile and Occupational Profile;obtaining a positive index between 55% and 65% in the previous factors. Wolfram software and the semantic text package were used to extract information, create tokens and classify the data.

Supply chain delays contribute to broader challenges

Systems engineering often contributes to a business' ability to operate effectively through a crisis. However, as the global economy continued to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, recurring systemic failures still ravaged the global supply chain. The supply chain's fragility lingered this year, and the aerospace industry's inability to receive parts when needed may extend beyond 2023. This weakness can be attributed to many issues, including a worker shortage and failure to account for a stressed global transportation system. Systems engineering can often mitigate the longterm effects of a major disruption. However, previous failures to fully model the global supply chain illustrates this problem's complexity. The pandemic demonstrated that the aerospace industry is not immune to global disruptions, even when those disruptions do not appear to involve these products. Aided by better systems modeling, market forces worked to correct failures amplified by the pandemic. Broad and strategic investments are needed to address the long-term workforce shortage.

How Can Authorities Support Distributed Improvisation During Major Crises? A Study of Decision Bottlenecks Arising During Local COVID-19 Vaccine Roll-Out

Despite the increased importance attributed to distributed improvisation in major crises, few studies investigate how central authorities can promote a harmonic, coordinated national response while allowing for distributed autonomy and improvisation. One idea implicit in the literature is that central authorities could help track and tackle common decision bottlenecks as they emerge across "improvising" local authorities as a result of shared, dynamic external constraints. To explore this idea we map central functions needed to roll-out vaccines to local populations and identify and classify bottlenecks to decision-making by local authorities managing COVID-19 vaccine roll-out in Norway. We found five bottlenecks which emerged as vaccine roll-out progressed, three of which could feasibly have been addressed by changing the local authorities' external constraints as the crisis developed. While the national crisis response strategy clearly allowed for distributed improvisation, our overall findings suggest that there is potential for central authorities to address external constraints in order to ease common bottlenecks as they emerge across local authorities responding to the crisis. More research is to explore alternative centralized response strategies and assess how well they effectively balance centralized and distributed control. The study contributes to the growing literature examining the interaction between local and centralized response in crisis management.

On the Application of Agile Project Management Techniques, V-Model and Recent Software Tools in Postgraduate Theses Supervision

Due to the nature of most postgraduate theses in control engineering and their similarities to industrial and software engineering projects, invoking novel project control techniques could be effective. In recent decades, agile techniques have attracted popularity thanks to their attributes in delivering successful projects. Hence exploiting those methods in education and thesis supervision of engineering topics can facilitate the process. On the other hand, because of the limitations imposed by the CoVid19 pandemic, the integration of well-established online tools in collaborative education is noteworthy. This paper proposes an application of the agile project management method for the supervision of postgraduate students' theses in the general field of engineering. The study extends a Scrum technique combined with approved systems engineering and team working tools such as Jira Software, Microsoft Teams, and Git version control (Github website). A custom designed V-model to nail an outstanding thesis is presented. The overall blended method is beneficial to provide feedback and self-assessment aid for the students and the supervisors. Employing this technique has shown promising progress in easing the supervision of students whilst helping them to manage their projects. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.

Crowdsourced Sentiment-Driven Process Re-design with SentiProMoWeb: Towards Enterprise Social Information Systems

Due to the new remote working conditions driven by the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, we extend our previous work on sentiment-enabled business process modeling by including crowdsourcing capabilities with a web interface: SentiProMoWeb. These capabilities enable us to perform sentiment-driven business process re-design method with remote stakeholders from different locations. SentiProMoWeb implements an enterprise social information system to capture the feedback from stakeholders in a crowdsourced manner. We demonstrate the crowdsourcing capabilities of our approach with an illustrative scenario by using our SentiProMoWeb software. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

On-line Meetings for Educating the Minds of Future Safety Engineers during the COVID Pandemic: An Experience Report

World-wide opportunities for “meetings of minds” was the goal of the research of visionaries who contributed to the creation of networked communication systems. During 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutes massively exploited these systems enabling virtual spaces of synchronous and asynchronous meetings among students and among students and teachers. Technology alone, however, is not sufficient. Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge (TPACK) and competence are paramount. In this paper, I report about my experience in pedagogically designing and implementing an on-line version of an advanced master course on safety-critical systems engineering, conceived and delivered as a series of Zoom-based, and Community-Of-Inquiry (COI)-oriented meetings plus Canvas-based threads of discussions for educating the minds of future safety and software engineers. I also report about the limited but still talkative COI-specific questionnaire-based evaluation, conducted with the purpose of better understanding the limits of moving the course on line and elicit areas of improvement, given that likely education on-line is now here to stay. Finally, I elaborate on a roadmap for future development, based on the results from the first instance. Copyright © 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Challenges and Opportunities for Process Systems Engineering in a Changed World

Changes have always been taking place on earth. However, the latest changes related to the climate, the COVID-19 pandemic, natural resources, pollution, to name a few, have changed our world and a new normal is emerging. The energy-water-environment-food-health nexus is becoming more complex. These challenges, however, also provide opportunities to tackle them and make scientific and engineering advances. PSE is well-placed through its core and expanding domain as well as its ability to apply a systems approach to meet current and future challenges. Many opportunities exist for the PSE community to take the lead in managing this complexity. This paper will provide an overview on some of the key challenges and opportunities where PSE could make immediate as well as long lasting impacts by developing sustainable and innovative solutions. Focus will be placed on the choice of problems to solve and the solution approaches that could make an impact and help to define the new normal for future generations. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Use of space analog missions as an educational tool in primary schools

Space exploration is a field that inspires a wide range of people, from children to university students, including the general public. With a return to the Moon planned for 2024 and the rapid expansion of the private industry, educating the next generation for this challenge becomes a priority. As many interdisciplinary programmes in universities are developed, the increasing interest in do-it-yourself projects can be observed. In addition, nothing inspires children more than the wish of becoming astronauts. By combining these two previously stated themes, space analog missions, simulations of life on another celestial body, were used as an educational tool for children, in our case in a primary school. In the frame of an EPFL semester project, such a program was run at the Vivalys primary school in Switzerland. A class of 16 children between the age of 6 and 9 successfully designed and conducted a simulated Mars-based mission from September 2020 to March 2021, in spite of the difficult COVID situation. The Vivalys Mission has been entirely integrated to the school year's program by adapting the educational subjects (mathematics, sciences, geography, French, sports, history, and arts), attending workshops, and performing hands-on experiments. Systems engineering approaches were adopted allowing the class to acquire knowledge regarding stakeholder analysis, risk management and decision tools. The young team made mission design choices and presented them to experts during reviews. Leadership, teamwork and autonomy were demonstrated and practiced. This tool is innovative: a do-it-yourself approach combined with education and practical work. The educational impact was studied using assessment strategies such as evaluations, rubrics and personal interviews. The progress and skills acquired, as well as their increasing will to work in the space field, were highlighted in the results. Following the success of this program, the local primary schools showed interest in running a similar project. Thanks to this first case study, lessons learned such as adapting the curriculum, organizing exterior activities, and enhancing the participation of adults, were collected. This is the first step towards impacting different age groups, starting in pre-school right up to secondary education. The success of our study underlines the current need and enthusiasm for such projects and will be further developed in the upcoming years becoming easily accessible to schools across Switzerland and the world, also through the promotion at IAC.

COVID-19 Implications for Research and Education on Engineered Structures and Services

While there may be a tendency to characterize COVID-19 as exclu-sively a public health issue, engineered structures and services have both mitigated and exacerbated the pandemic’s march around the globe, raising questions about the role of engineering in controlling pandemics. Any attempts to answer these questions implicate not only the tools, techniques and problems which we define as within the province of engineering, but also the means by which we ar¬rive at this definition. As described here—in settings ranging from nursing homes to prisons to Brazilian favelas—the COVID-19 crisis has upended a number of foundational notions associated with the practice of hazard mitigation through the design and operation of engineered structures and services. It has revealed the need to ex¬amine the conditions and assumptions that characterize the models we construct and the data we collect. We do so through a number of case studies collected during the COVID-19 crisis, leading to im¬plications for the conduct of research and education to support not only further advances in our field but to improved prospects for im¬proved mitigation of pandemics and other hazards. © 2020, Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.

A Study on the Impact of COVID-19 Epidemic on Civil Engineering System

In 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic broke out and since then civil engineering systems all over the world have been deeply influenced. The epidemic prevention policies directly made most of conventional works not feasible and new ways of working for civil system are needed like telecommuting and other remote technologies. In this paper, the approaches of system engineering are used to divide normal civil engineering system into many phases from the perspective of civil system development and list impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on each phase. The system analysis make us have a more comprehensive understanding of the problem in civil system and make it possible to optimize a specific phase in more targeted way. Moreover, in this way, we can not only comprehend the characteristics of every phase, but also clarify the relationships between them. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

AGILE MODEL-BASED SYSTEMS ENGINEERING OF PASSENGER TRAIN OPERATIONAL DESIGN

The Railway industry is facing a productivity issue as is often publicised with regular delays in rolling stock projects [1]. Plus, there is a growing need for innovation in remote services and management that have become the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic. It drives a need for better Systems Engineering (SE) methods which include increased automation and dependence between systems and system performance, increasing number of disparate specialist engineering teams. [2] The aim of this paper is to develop an adaptable model which expresses the operational behavior of a train system in different railway environments, this model will be quickly and accurately configured to a specific environment to define the needs for a specific passenger service mission. Preventing late changes (cost and time-saving) by generating the right system requirements at the very early design phase through agile Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach is the key benefit. Another goal includes increased productivity by minimizing unnecessary manual transcription of concepts when coordinating the work of large teams. This Generic* functional model of a Rolling Stock system can be configured to define specific products for an operator or Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Copyright © 2022 by ASME

Development of a Causal Model to Study the Disparate Effects of COVID-19 on Minorities

This paper proposes a systems engineering perspective to analyze the causes of COVID-19 health disparities impact and interventions to minimize the impact on minorities. The impact of the novel coronavirus has shown to be more intense on minorities. The percentage of COVID-19 case count and fatality rate for minorities is much higher than that of the general population, showing that they are more significantly affected than others. Many different factors influence this impact, ranging from economic to cultural. In this paper, these factors are shown to be connected through a causal model analyzing the effects of each factor, after which, potential interventions are suggested. Many factors are identified, such as high employment in the service industry or lower likelihood to have insurance. From this, a causal model is created showing the impact of each factor. Using this causal model, one can identify the high-impact factors causing a disparate impact as well as suggest possible interventions including making testing and treatment more accessible, reducing healthcare bias, and improving healthcare for immigrants. © 2021 IEEE.

Business Process Improvement in Distributor Company to Increase The Timeliness of Delivery

Pandemic Covid-19 has had an impact not only on health aspects but also on the economy of Indonesia, both from demand and supply. Problems in Indonesia's government, such as the lack of medical equipment and supporting facilities in handling Covid-19 pandemics, have triggered the need for a sudden (urgent/emergency). On the other hand, there are still many distributor companies that have no experience in handling emergencies. One of the impacts is the delivery of goods that are not on time /late. To solve the problem, this study aims to get a process business in a distributor company with more effective and efficient processes by involving intercompany to increase the timeliness of delivery to customers. We propose using BPR (Business Process Reengineering) and simulation to model and analyze the current process and redesign the repair process. The results were obtained, with the average procurement of goods decreased by 46%. © 2022 IEEE.

Role of systems engineering attributes in enhancing supply chain resilience: Healthcare in context of COVID-19 pandemic.

In recent years, the area of supply chain resilience has received heightened attention as a plethora of new risks, ranging from climate change to cybersecurity and infectious diseases, have emerged as serious threats to operational performance. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has exposed the fragility of global supply chains in many sectors. Given these concerns, supply chain networks, including those designed based on the principles of lean philosophies, are increasingly being re-examined as firms grapple with the challenge of strengthening the capacity to withstand, absorb, and rebound from unexpected shocks. Addressing the urgency of this imperative, this study presents a novel framework-based on theories and concepts in the systems engineering (SE) and supply chain resilience domains to enhance the resilience implementation capabilities that are lacking in many of today's firms. By applying a Grounded Theory methodology, this study develops and validates a conceptual model that identifies six core attributes fundamental to developing resilience capabilities in complex supply chains. The study concludes by providing examples of, and insights into, the role of these attributes in building supply chain resilience.