An important issue in engineering design and manufacturing is the inevitable presence of uncertainty due to manufacturing tolerance or uncontrollable environment conditions, which can significantly degrade the performance of a design product and/or can change its feasibility by making a feasible solution infeasible. The uncertainty is exacerbated in multidisciplinary design optimization for the design problems with multiple objectives whereby several disciplinary optimization problems are coupled and the uncertainty can propagate across disciplines. To determine the effect of the uncertainty and reduce its effect efficiently, it is important to conduct the sensitivity analysis for design optimization with uncertainty.
To provide a system perspective of mechanical and manufacturing, and in general, engineering problems to support engineering design and decision making, this talk focuses on multidisciplinary multi-objective optimization and sensitivity analysis approaches for improving both the design objective and feasibility of multidisciplinary systems, as well as for understanding, analyzing, and optimally eliminating or reducing the effects of input uncertainty during the conceptual phase of system design, with efficient multi-objective optimization methods.

Biography
Dr. Mian Li currently is a tenure-track assistant professor in the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute at Shanghai, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the University of Maryland at College Park in December 2007 with the Best Dissertation Award. He received his BE (1994) and MS (2001) both from Automation Department, Tsinghua University, China. Within the Mechanical Engineering Program at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, his research work has been focused on robust/reliability based multidisciplinary design optimization and sensitivity analysis, including topics such as multidisciplinary design optimization, robust/reliability design, sensitivity analysis, and approximation modeling.

注：学术报告后还将举办上海交通大学密歇根学院招收2010年博士、硕士研究生的说明会，欢迎自动化、机械、精仪、工业工程等相关院系7字班学生踊跃参加。