Under the umbrella concepts of upscaling and emerging technology, a wide variety of phenomena related to technology development and deployment in society are examined to meet societal imperatives (e.g., environment, safety, social justice). The design literature does not provide an explicit common theoretical and practical framework to clarify the assessment method to handle “an” upscaling. In this nebulous context, designers are struggling to identify the characteristics to anticipate the consequences of emerging technology upscaling. This article therefore first proposes a structuring framework to analyze the literature in a wide range of industrial sectors (energy, chemistry, building, etc.). This characterization brought to light five prevalent archetypes clarifying the concepts of upscaling and emerging technology. Then, a synthesis of invariants and methodological requirements for designers is proposed to deal with upscaling assessment according to each archetype, based on a literature review of existing design methods. This literature review process showed a disparity in treatment for some archetypes, regarding the industrial sector. A discussion is consequently proposed in the conclusion to guide design practices.

Self-organizing systems (SOS) are developed to perform complex tasks in unforeseen situations with adaptability. Predefining rules for self-organizing agents can be challenging, especially in tasks with high complexity and changing environments. Our previous work has introduced a multiagent reinforcement learning (RL) model as a design approach to solving the rule generation problem of SOS. A deep multiagent RL algorithm was devised to train agents to acquire the task and self-organizing knowledge. However, the simulation was based on one specific task environment. Sensitivity of SOS to reward functions and systematic evaluation of SOS designed with multiagent RL remain an issue. In this paper, we introduced a rotation reward function to regulate agent behaviors during training and tested different weights of such reward on SOS performance in two case studies: box-pushing and T-shape assembly. Additionally, we proposed three metrics to evaluate the SOS: learning stability, quality of learned knowledge, and scalability. Results show that depending on the type of tasks; designers may choose appropriate weights of rotation reward to obtain the full potential of agents’ learning capability. Good learning stability and quality of knowledge can be achieved with an optimal range of team sizes. Scaling up to larger team sizes has better performance than scaling downwards.

Many of the most fundamental decisions about a product are made during the system architecture design process. However, how system architecture is designed in practice is not well understood. This paper draws on several research studies related to system architecture design to develop a categorization of system architecture design processes to support the adaptation design methodologies and tools to specific situations. The paper reviews different definitions of system architecture and comments on the relevance of the different perspectives taken in the literature on system architecture to different types of system architecture. The research highlights the need for further empirical research on system architecture design processes as well as on tools to support the engineers creating the system architecture.

In a measurement system with intelligent, distributed sensor processes, complementary observations from different sensor need be combined with each other. This paper describes a method based on fuzzy measures, in which a global ‘fusion algorithm’ questions the sensors as to their support and opinion of a hypothesis. The sensor opinions are clustered into groups based on their support of each others' opinions, and fused using a new fuzzy operator.

This paper draws on epistemology, theory, published data, hypothesis testing and synthesis to explore the predictive and explanatory power of a far-from-equilibrium interpretation of the history of human settlement on Rapa Nui. Our interpretation of the last 1500 years of human settlement on Rapa Nui provides an important competing hypothesis by which to test the explanatory power of earlier equilibrium interpretations of this history. Our evaluation of this competing hypothesis suggests that it provides, overall, a more satisfactory theory that has interesting implications for the goal of sustaining human civilisation.