Objectives

This project aims to sensitize students to sustainability issues when designing a system. Given is a simple task like in the real world. This could be like moving something/someone from a point A to a point B. This is widely used in the industrial and economic fields: transportation of good, of people, of equipments etc. As the objective of the task is a simple statement, there are several reasonable technical solutions to solve this task. The question arises: how can we compare those solutions in order to evaluate the “best” one. In other words, which criteria are relevant to be considered when designing a system solution and how can we measure the final system on those those criteria? These questions need to be answered in this project together with a prototype.

Project
The project consists of two parts:

1. Criteria definition and evaluation
First, the students have to define the relevant criteria (economical, ecological...) considering the system application: moving logged trees from the edge of a forest to a wood factory. As the next step will be to design a prototype using a “Lego Mindstorms” kit, the group also has to define how to evaluate the prototype compliance according to each criterion. During this stage, all the students are working together to elaborate one list of criteria and their evaluation processes. Note that sustainability has to be a non-negotiable objective for the final system.

2. Prototype design and test
As mentioned before, the students are requested to provide a prototype of an optimal solution, according to the criteria defined during the first stage. The all group will be divided into three sub-groups of three students. Each sub-group will have a “Lego Mindstorms” kit and will be expected to provide a prototype for their solution. At the end, a competition will be organized to identify the best strategie/solution to the transportation problem using the criteria evaluation processes defined by the students.

Dream Team

Ideally 9 students in order to be able to make 3 sub-teams of 3 students for the competition. Each sub-team must be heterogeneous with students of:

Environmental-Students and Management-Students or Students with sustainable background: Develop of different ecological, economical models. Evaluation of common quali-/quantitative creterias to measure a sustainable system solution to the given task. Designing a system solution/strategies with the aspects of this sustainable solution.

Mechanical, Electronic, Computer-Science-Students or Students with Engineering background: Designing a system solution/strategies with the aspects of this sustainable solution. Building and programming a functional prototype on probably LEGO Mindstorms.  

Apply to the project                         

Contact

Martin Vogel
Technical University of Lucerne
martin.vogel@hslu.ch

Rémy Guyonneau
University of Angers
remy.guyonneau@univ-angers.fr

Read more about the lecturers