This innovative practice full paper presents the implementation of whole system mapping for sustainable design thinking in engineering and non-engineering courses. Sustainable design has gained substantially more attention in both academia and industry as increasingly designers of products and services are expected to consider the longevity and sustainability of their products and services. Whole system mapping entails consideration of the resources, users, product life cycle, environment, and the interconnections of a product or service idea during design. Using the open educational resources, whole system mapping exercises were incorporated in senior engineering Project Management and senior Electrical and Computer Engineering Project Lab courses with engineering students, and a Gulf of Mexico Studies course for non-engineering students as a method to introduce the students to the idea of sustainable design. In this paper, we compared the students' utilization of whole system mapping to help them demonstrate sustainable design thinking in their proposed project ideas. This innovative practice assisted the students with determining resources needed to create their product or service, and whether more sustainable materials/ options could be chosen. The exercise assisted the students in considering the product life cycle from ideation to disuse of the product/service, and how they could incorporate reuse/ repurposing/recycling to extend the life of the product or its parts. The students considered the interactions based on the purpose of the product to incorporate useability in their design. Finally, the students also established connections to the users and where the product/service outputs or outcomes may end up, impacting their environment. Creative ideas were generated both in the interdisciplinary engineering and single-discipline engineering courses at two institutions. Non-engineering teams also brought fresh perspectives to the process with alternative project ideas in one course. This case study represents part of a wider study that includes additional cohorts to study whole system mapping and students' skills development in sustainable design.

The availability of inexpensive sensor, communication, and computing devices continue to drive a rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This has resulted in an increase in the importance of the inclusion of IoT related content in education programs. A project underway at Texas A&M University-Kingsville seeks to support teaching IoT concepts to remote learners through the design and deployment of IoT learning toolkits. A series of exercises have been developed to assist remote learners in becoming familiar with the toolkits and to introduce basic IoT concepts. The learning kits are to be deployed in two senior level capstone project courses to teach IoT related concepts and encourage students to consider how IoT technology might be beneficial for and integrated into their project designs.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in changes in learning methods and attitudes in the STEM fields. The pandemic forced institutions of higher education to explore remote teaching/learning systems and tools some of which remain in use today. Such remote teaching/learning systems and tools present challenges for most STEM fields that involve hands-on experiences through laboratory or workshop environments that require access to devices, instruments and/or equipment. The engaged student learning through IoT project was introduced as a means to enable students to perform hands-on learning activities in their own time and space with minimal need for and dependence on university laboratory resources. In this paper, we describe engaged student learning through problem- and project-based learning (PBL) in IoT-based projects in senior capstone design courses at two Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Particular attention is paid to engagement and learning of historically under-represented student groups in capstone teams. Students in multidisciplinary teams borrowed IoT devices for the duration of their course work to discover and learn on their own with instructor guidance and developed course materials. The evaluation of the student performance and feedback indicate that students have benefited from access to IoT devices outside the laboratory environments by developing creative solutions to the undertaken capstone projects as well as problem-solving skills that are expected in the workforce. In this statistically small student sample size, there were no notable differences observed in the success of historically underrepresented students vs. all other students in the IoT-based projects in terms of engaged student learning. The IoT devices enabled the teams to undertake multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects that involved mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering technology, and computer science students, each contributing to different objectives of the project to achieve the overall goal.

This paper presents a network controlled Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) control framework for a hydro power plant. The linearized plant dynamics is assumed to be controlled via remote controller operations over communication networks. The controller action to hydro plant and the plant output to controller input signals are assumed to be transmitted over different networks with a bounded network delay and associated packet drops. As the network delay is modeled as a Pade approximation, the control system signal transmissions over the networks are modeled as an LPV system such that the accurately received packets and lost packets are used as the real-time time-varying parameter that can be measurable in future periods. The communication network LPV characteristics are expressed in terms of a polytopic parameter-dependent model to efficiently characterize the overall network operations for received and lost packages, and the associated LPV controller synthesis perspectives are detailed. The networked controlled LPV controller synthesis and simulation results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework for networked control system delay and packet loss issues on stability and performance.

Energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an important area of research for practical WSN deployment for extended periods of time. Appropriate topology control (TC), consisting of topology construction and maintenance, facilitates an energy aware and load balanced network while ensuring connectivity and coverage. In this research, the authors propose a novel load balanced TC protocol for connectivity — EAST (Energy Aware Spanning Tree). The EAST protocol's goal is to balance the load while reducing energy utilization for the network. The EAST protocol builds upon the Minimal Spanning Tree (MST) construction method. A Connected Dominating Set (CDS) is constructed while taking into account the energy level of each parent branch to form the communication backbone. The aim of this EAST protocol is to place as many nodes into sleep mode while maintaining the communication backbone of active nodes as determined based on an energy metric. Dynamic Global Topology Recreation (DGTRec) was implemented as the topology maintenance protocol which periodically builds a new communication backbone. The proposed EAST algorithm was simulated and compared with Simple Tree, Random Nearest Neighbor Tree (Random NNT) and Euclidian Minimal Spanning Tree (Euclidian MST). The simulation results demonstrate that the EAST algorithm improves load balancing and event coverage as compared to the other tested algorithms.

In this research, the simulation of the landing and descent of a Boeing 747 in its linearized landing configuration model are controlled using fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs). The rule bases for the FLCs are functions of the linearized model's inputs, the Boeing 747's vertical velocity and altitude. The crisp FLC outputs, as determined by the centroid method, are the elevator and throttle deflections. Different types of membership functions are tested with the FLCs to determine the efficacy of the tested membership types for the given application for landing an aircraft. Future work will involve comparing the FLCs to more conventional controllers.

A growing number of organizational enterprises (e.g. government, industry and academia) are adopting and utilizing the enterprise architecture (EA) model within their respective domains. The multi-tiered federal enterprise architecture framework (FEAF) is an example of the expanding role of interoperable Web services that span organizational domains (e.g. Navy, DoD, Federal and others). To enable such EA services, lexicon management and associated semantic alignment capabilities are an emerging requirement. The purpose of this paper is to report an initial assessment of currently available tools that in principle facilitate the implementation of a much needed semantic alignment process that helps address this emerging requirement for enterprise-wide lexicon services.