Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 3 sessions / week, 1 hour 50 minutes/ session

Background

This course was created for the "product development" track of MIT's System Design and Management Program (SDM) in conjunction with the Center for Innovation in Product Development.

Course Objectives

After taking this course, a student should be able to:

• Formulate measures of performance of a system or quality characteristics.  These quality characteristics are to be made robust to noise affecting the system.
• Sythesize and select design concepts for robustness.
• Identify noise factors whose variation may affect the quality characteristics.
• Estimate the robustness of any given design (experimentally and analytically).
• Formulate and implement methods to reduce the effects of noise (parameter design, active control, adjustment).
• Select rational tolerances for a design.
• Explain the role of robust design techniques within the wider context of the product development process.
• Lead product development activities that include robust design techniques.

Course Format

This course will be designed to accommodate the new SDM split summer format. The students will be on campus for the first 5 weeks and back at their companies for the last five weeks. The first five weeks will therefore be accelerated to help students balance the workload more evenly over the summer.

Term Project

The course will require a substantial, team-based design project. The goal will be to define industrially relevant design projects in the SDM sponsor companies and at MIT. Teams will document their efforts in a written report and make a formal presentation of their results.