The '2019 Best Paper Award' was awarded by the best US-based Engineering Design Journal – the Journal of Mechanical Design. The Journal of Mechanical Design is a distinguished journal renowned for its extensive scope on design activity, covering areas such as design optimisation, uncertainty modelling and simulation-based design which serve a broad design community. Within this are seven categories of topics including: design automation, design education, design theory methodology, design for manufacturing and the life cycle issues, design of energy and power supply, design of mechanism and robots, and design of direct contact systems such as cams and gears. The Journal is also known for its selective review process and diversity of authors from academia, industry and government, which account for its high-quality and ground-breaking papers.
The announcement of the award on 7th January 2020 saw Mohammad Hassannezhad, along with his collaborators Marco Cantamessa, Francesca Montagna and P. John Clarkson, receive the 2019 Editors’ Choice Paper Award.
The announcement of the award can be viewed here.
Their winning paper, entitled 'Managing Sociotechnical Complexity in Engineering Design Projects', discusses the development of an original method to inform decisions at the early stages of product development processes, where the information is uncertain. Their proposed method refers to Actor-Based Signposting (ABS) and looks at the sociotechnical interfaces, trying to predict the impact of organisational dynamics on business process performance. ABS combines the functionality of task-forward Workflow-Nets and Actor Analysis where the output confidence level of actors (i.e. designers, engineers) on design decisions determines the simulation progress. The objective is to be proactive and contemplate the minimum level of expertise required to perform operations, thus helping the lengthy and labour-intensive processes, such as in the Aerospace and Automotive sectors, to leverage knowledge-cost levels.
This work is the outcome of a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, where I have been working as a Research Associate funded by Rolls-Royce Aerospace and British Telecom, and the Politecnico di Torino in Italy where I accomplished my PhD in Engineering Systems Design. The key benefit of such collaboration was creating an opportunity to evolve my previous research (in an Automotive Engineering Consultancy) with real constraints and data and ensuring its utility in a different setting.
Dr Mohammad Hassannezhad
ACSE Research Associate
About Mohammad Hassannezhad:
Mohammed is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at The University of Sheffield. He has worked on complex business problems across five industries spanning: Agriculture (John Deere, Iran-Pump), Automotive (Fiat Powertrain, CNH Industrial), Aerospace (Rolls-Royce), Telecom (Italian Telecom, British Telecom), and currently Health systems (Sheffield City Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Scottish Government) for over a decade.
He will continue to work to solve these complex problems, with future plans to collaborate with the Engineering Design Centre of Cambridge University to develop new projects on aspects of Engineering and Organisational Systems Design.