City Research Online

Abstract

To ensure extended useful life of systems during pandemics such as coronavirus disease (COVID-19), systems independent of traditional maintenance, repair, and servicing will be required. Ambitious new designs are needed, such as self-engineering (SE) systems to automatically respond to return lost functionality and improve product resilience without human intervention. Development in SE has focused on self-healing materials, self-reconfiguring electronics, and self-adapting robotics. There has been little work to evaluate SE systems holistically and develop new design tools for creating new SE systems. This paper presents a framework for evaluating the complexity of SE systems and the validation of the framework with expert interviews. There was agreement between experts and the authors for 21/24 of factors for the 8 SE examples (4 biological and 4 engineering) evaluated using the framework. Disagreements in results were caused by a lack of knowledge on the system being evaluated or misunderstanding about the system operation.

Publication Type:	Article
Publisher Keywords:	Self-engineering; manufacturing; repair; complexity; bioinspired; design
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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