Publications related to Rigorous Design of Cyber-physical Systems

Co-Design Optimisation of Morphing Topology and Control of Winged Drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Fabio Bergonti

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient solution. However, m ...

IEEE2024

Leveraging the Snap Buckling of Bistable Magnetic Shells to Design a Refreshable Braille Dot

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Bastien Freddy Gustave Aymon, Arefeh Abbasi, Tian Chen

A design concept is proposed for the building block, a dot, of programmable braille readers utilizing bistable shell buckling, magnetic actuation, and pneumatic loading. The design process is guided by Finite Element simulations, which are initially valida ...

Wiley2023

TRACE: A Conceptual Model to Guide the Design of Educational Chatbots

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Adrian Christian Holzer, Maria Jesus Rodriguez Triana, Juan Carlos Farah, Fanny Kim-Lan Lasne

Driven by the rising popularity of chatbots such as ChatGPT, there is a budding line of research proposing guidelines for chatbot design, both in general and specifically for digital education. Nevertheless, few researchers have focused on providing concep ...

Springer2023

Risk of incorrect choices due to uncertainty in BPS evaluations of conceptual-stage neighbourhood-scale building designs

Marilyne Andersen, Luisa Pastore, Minu Agarwal

At the conceptual stage, building performance simulation (BPS) based evaluations are being increasingly used for tasks such as ranking of competing massing design proposals. However, such conceptual stage evaluations suffer from information deficiency in b ...

2023

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Conversational Agents in Digital Education

Juan Carlos Farah

The presence of conversational agents (or chatbots) in educational contexts has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Recent surveys have shown widespread interest in the use of chatbots in education, both for research and practice. Although th ...

EPFL2023

Thermal Conditions in Indoor Environments: Exploring the Reasoning behind Standard-Based Recommendations

Dolaana Khovalyg

Professionals in the building design and operation fields typically look at standards and guidelines as a reliable source of information and guidance with regard to procedural, contractual, and legal scope and requirements that are relevant to accountabili ...

2023

Collective data-based drawings A common ground for adaptive contributive design

The laboratory ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) advances a comprehensive approach to data-based drawing oriented towards architectural and urban co-design processes. This drawing methodolog ...

2023

Computational Conceptual Design – Typological Exploration Of Spatial Truss Systems Through Optimization

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Jonas Warmuth, Pierluigi D'Acunto

Exploring a wide range of relevant design options from the outset is crucial for every sound conceptual design process. Optimization techniques are generally employed to generate well-performing structural design options. However, focusing only on performa ...

2023

The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been criticized for minimizing users' autonomy, marginalizing minorities, and exploiting users' data for prof ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry-based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

Denis Gillet, Maria Jesus Rodriguez Triana

Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed accoun ...

2021

A consistent safety format and design approach for brittle systems and application to textile reinforced concrete structures

Aurelio Muttoni, Miguel Fernández Ruiz, Patrick Lorenzo Valeri, Qianhui Yu

Design and verification of structures in modern codes of practice account for a safety format, ensuring that the probability of failure does not exceed a given threshold. Although specific safety formats are proposed in some cases for special types of stru ...

2021

Facilitators First: Building a Tool With Facilitators to Foster a More Collaborative Makerspace Community Through Movement Traces

Bertrand Roland Schneider, Léonore Valentine Guillain

Research indicates that makerspaces equip students with the practical skills needed to build their own projects and thrive in the twenty-first-century workforce. While the appeal of makerspaces lies in their spirit of tinkering and community-driven ethos, ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Functional Inverse Problems on Spheres: Theory, Algorithms and Applications

Matthieu Martin Jean-André Simeoni

Many scientific inquiries in natural sciences involve approximating a spherical field -namely a scalar quantity defined over a continuum of directions- from generalised samples of the latter (e.g. directional samples, local averages, etc). Such an approxim ...

EPFL2020

The Role of Machine Learning in the Understanding and Design of Materials

Seyedmohamad Moosavi, Berend Smit, Kevin Maik Jablonka

Developing algorithmic approaches for the rational design and discovery of materials can enable us to systematically find novel materials, which can have huge technological and social impact. However, such rational design requires a holistic perspective ov ...

2020

Surveying the environmental life-cycle performance assessments: Practice and context at early building design stages

Emmanuel Rey, Marilyne Andersen, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme

The international greenhouse gas agreements call for mitigations in the building industry. Thus, the number of scientific publications about life-cycle performance assessment (LCPA) follows an exponential trend since the 2000s. However, previous surveys hi ...

2020

Design and control of a prototype structure that adapts to loading through large shape changes

Ian Smith, Arka Prabhata Reksowardojo, Gennaro Senatore, Apoorv Srivastava

This paper reports on experimental testing that was carried out on a prototype adaptive structure designed to counteract the effect of loading through controlled large shape changes. The prototype is 6.6 m truss equipped with 12 linear actuators which has ...

ELSEVIER2020

Antenna for a Cranial Implant: Simulation Issues and Design Strategies

Anja Skrivervik, Miroslav Veljovic, Ismael Vico Triviño, Zvonimir Sipus

The design of a specific antenna for a cranial implant is used to illustrate design and simulation issues linked to implantable antennas. After a brief introduction, we will review the requirements for the antenna, and go through the design process, discus ...

IEEE2020

An integrative approach for embodied energy: Towards an LCA-based data-driven design method

Emmanuel Rey, Marilyne Andersen, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme

The built environment is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To tackle climate change, global targets have been set for this sector. Although life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods are typically used to evaluate a building project ...

2018

Usability assessment of building performance simulation tools: a pilot study

Marilyne Andersen, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme, Stefano Cozza

Due to climate change, the built environment is facing increasingly strict environmental targets. Thus, architects are challenged to design evermore high-performing buildings, a task for which they can no longer depend solely on their experience and intuit ...

2018

The Graphic Statics behind the Collier Memorial

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet

This paper reviews the various graphic statics methods applied during the early structural design of the Collier Memorial, Cambridge, MA. Built in 2015 to honor fallen MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, the monument is a vaulted assembly of massive granite b ...

2018