There are 5 laboratories under the Design & Human Factors Group:

• Design and Human Factors Lab (N3.2-B1-02) 
• Motion Analysis (N3-B2b-05a)
• Model Shop (N3.1-B4-07) 
• Innovation@MAE Lab (N3-B4a-02a) 
• Computer Aided Engineering (N3-B3b-05) 

Research Projects

Integrated System for the Future Air Traffic Management Work Place and Human Factors Evaluations of Conflict Resolution Aid in Future Air Traffic Control
This project proposes the development and evaluation of a future work place for air traffic controllers. The proposed work place integrates layers of interaction between the user, and several active and passive displays as well as other touch and tactile user interfaces. 

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Human Factors in Vessel Traffic Management: Causal Factors and Preventive Interventions
This work is designed to investigate and mitigate human fatigues in vessel traffic management (VTM) focusing on operators’ workload and human factors, as well as the VTM workspace environment and system ergonomics.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Physical Digital Human Modeling for Proactive Ergonomics
This study focuses on investigating into some basic but essential digital human modeling techniques to build the groundwork for developing an interactive virtual system in which digital humans can look, act, and even think like real humans do.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Tools for Initial Design & Bidding in a Collaborative Design Chain
The aim of this project is to focus on the initial portion of the PDLC (Product Development Life-Cycle), containing commercial bidding for product development contracts, specification development and conceptual design.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

A Correlation Handling Strategy for Consumer-Oriented Emotional Design of New Products
A prototype product emotional design system is established for facilitating the conceptual design of consumer products with desired emotional impacts.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

A Study of Context Based Multi-Sensory Product Experience
This project aims at establishing a novel methodology to systematically acquire users’ multi-sensory experience from a contextual level concerning individual differences and comprehensively integrate the multiple aspects of user experiences qualitatively and quantitatively.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

An Investigation into Affective Properties of Sporting Goods Based on Cycling Experience
In this work, user experience techniques are adapted and a profiling model is proposed to meet individual psychological needs in a bid to improve a player’s game by training with positive emotions constantly.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Research Projects

Soft Computing for Concurrent Product Design Evolution and Evaluation
A computer-aided concurrent product design evolution and evaluation approach has been developed, with which a product can be designed and evaluated in terms of assemblability, manufacturability, and estimated costs simultaneously through a blackboard architecture. 

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Development of a Decision-Support System for Detecting Maritime Security Threats
The aim of the project is to develop a decision support system to detect, mitigate and deter possible maritime security threats, and provide early warning so that preventative measures against possible security threats affecting ships or port facilities can be taken.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

A Knowledge Handling Strategy for Customer-Oriented Product Conceptualization
A prototype customer-oriented product conceptualization system was established to provide a generic product platform that can be used for the design of tangible or intangible products under a unified framework.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Design Project Management for New Product Development in a Global Collaborated Environment
An agent-based intelligent system is established by integrating agent technology and a potpourri of novel approaches and methodologies to realise a tool for real-time modelling, analysis and dynamic scheduling of iterative design projects in a global collaborated environment.

Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Management and Forecast of Dynamic Customer Needs
A customer requirements analysis and forecast system, based on the principles of artificial immune and neural systems is constructed to track and learn the dynamism of customer needs evolution, and to perform data forecast.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Customer Needs Management for Product Innovation: Segmentation Modeling and Ontology-Based Approaches
This study aims at building a novel customer needs management system (CNMS), which comprises an Involvement-Thinking-Feeling (ITF) segmentation model and an ontology-learning customer needs representation (OCNR) system, to accurately identify innovative customers and represent customer needs.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

A Customer-Oriented Product Conceptualization Strategy Based on Crowd-Innovation
The project aims at establishing solutions for a simplified product innovation approach that is built on customer contributions to pursue radical innovation through both knowledge and technology perspectives.

Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Chun-Hsien

Supply-chain inventory planning
In our latest research (in collaboration with a colleague from the business school) published in POMS journal, we have developed a new 2-bin policy for satisfying the demand from differentiated classes. In case of two demand classes, the policy has been shown to provide much higher service level to lower priority classes, at only a slight increase in system cost. An extension to this work (to multiple demand classes) has been completed and is ready for submission.

Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Rajesh Piplani

Performance-based contracting
As buyers of capital-intensive systems have looked to contain costs of service and improve system availability, they are increasing turning to some sort of pay-for-performance contract. In our research we have developed models of performance for repairable inventory system operating under PBC, and have also studied such systems under changing fleet size.

Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Rajesh Piplani

Identifying Vulnerabilities and Extreme Risks in Critical Infrastructure Networks
Interdependencies and failure propagation in critical infrastructure networks are modeled, and optimization applied to compute extreme risks and identify critical failure points and disruption vulnerabilities.

Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Tai Kang