Key Takeaways

• Teaching methods grounded in applied statistics provide hands-on experience solving real-world, interdisciplinary challenges.
• Students develop a holistic, systems-based approach to engineering.
• Graduates are better prepared to make an impact in industry, government, and research.

Building a sustainable human presence on the Moon requires more than breakthrough technologies. It demands a deep understanding of how transportation, energy, communications, infrastructure, and operations interact as a single system. With every decision creating ripple effects across the mission, engineers must navigate a landscape of complex trade-offs and interconnections, where success depends on understanding the entire system.

For more than three decades, the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) at the Georgia Institute of Technology has equipped students to deal with problems of this type. By helping students explore the intersection of research, education, and industry, the ASDL equips them integrate different disciplines, cope with uncertainty, and make informed decisions in complex situations.

Professor Dimitri Mavris, Regents' Professor and Director of ASDL, stated that ASDL could not have developed into the organization it has become without its longstanding relationship with JMP and the support and analytical capabilities JMP provides.

Founded in 1992, ASDL was created in response to a challenge identified by industry leaders: while universities were producing talented specialists, there was a growing need for engineers who could understand and design complete systems. “We established this lab as an answer to criticism by industry that a lot of universities were producing scientists and not engineers, and the companies had to retrain them,” said Mavris. Today, ASDL brings researchers and students together to work on real government and industry projects, exploring how technical, operational, and economic decisions influence performance across an entire system.

Mavris stated that the objective was simple: "We're converting them from disciplinarians into system thinkers and system architects."

Developing systems thinkers

One of the characteristic features of ASDL's approach is that it does not confine students to classroom activities or simplified case studies; rather, the students address challenges that are as complex as those found in present-day engineering programs. The students' current research covers a variety of areas related to exploration of the moon and Mars, such as habitats, logistics, transportation, communications, and the supporting infrastructure.

While students are expected to build models and produce data, they must also explain what the results mean, question their own assumptions, and relate their findings to the overall aims of the project.

“Making a plot and just showing it to an audience doesn’t answer the question,” said Dr. Michael Balchanos, Senior Research Engineer in ASDL’s Digital Engineering Division and lead for its Intelligence Systems efforts.

The fact that interpretation is stressed is intentional. While drawing up a chart or carrying out an analysis is only one element of the process, the greater challenge is to understand what the results show, what assumptions influenced them, and how they should affect future decisions.

By encouraging this kind of critical thinking, ASDL helps students develop skills that extend far beyond technical proficiency. Upon graduation, students have the capacity to ask better questions, consider alternatives in a thoughtful way, and make informed decisions in cases where certainty is generally not possible.

JMP as a platform for exploration and decision making

JMP has been part of ASDL since the very beginning and is the laboratory's primary statistical analysis environment.

For ASDL, JMP is much more than just a tool for drawing charts or performing calculations; it provides a common environment where students can integrate design of experiments, surrogate modeling, probabilistic analysis, sensitivity analysis, and interactive visualization into a single workflow.

Even as AI tools and coding assistants make it easier to generate code or automate parts of an analysis, JMP provides something different: a trusted, transparent environment where students can explore assumptions, test alternatives, and understand the reasoning behind the results.

“There’s also the aspect that whatever I’m seeing from that analysis, I can trust,” said Balchanos. “There’s transparency. I can track the steps. The students can link the steps they took in the tool to what the theory is about.”

Transparency is particularly important in the case of complicated projects that have many interconnected variables. Using JMP, students are able to check their assumptions, investigate relationships, and gain an understanding of how a change in one area can affect outcomes in other areas. Instead of looking for one answer, they can assess different scenarios and get a better grasp of the implications of each option.

This process encourages exploration. Besides discovering where opportunities are, students also learn where constraints appear and how uncertainty can influence the results. Rather than focusing on arriving at the “correct” answer, the aim is to gain an understanding of the range of possible outcomes.

Engineering for a changing future

Hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, and campus-scale digital twins might appear to have no connection with one another. Yet at ASDL, they all form part of the same question: how can you redesign complex systems for a changing future? Recent work at the lab is looking into alternative fuels, like hydrogen and liquefied natural gas, as well as sustainable aviation fuels. But it involves more than simply changing the fuels. It also means focusing on how switching to new energy sources would require changes to infrastructure and logistics. For example, airports might need new systems to support electric vehicles and aircraft, as well as upgraded electricity supplies.

To monitor resource consumption, predict demand, and investigate how new technologies could boost efficiency, the team makes use of digital engineering tools, such as a digital twin, a virtual replica of the Georgia Tech campus that allows researchers to model, monitor, and test changes in a simulated environment. The collaborations that ASDL has entered into with bodies like NASA, the Office of Naval Research, and important industry partners give real-world relevance to their projects. Throughout all this, JMP has remained at the core of its work by enabling both researchers and students to understand complex data and turn it into meaningful insight.

Mavris points out that visualization is key to making sense of complex systems. Without it, many of ASDL's current analyses and discoveries would have been hard or even impossible to achieve.

The complexity of these challenges pushes students to think well beyond the borders of their own disciplines. Through the use of modeling, simulation, and the interactive analytics provided by JMP, they are able to observe the way decisions have a cascading effect within a system, impacting factors such as performance and cost, as well as operations and sustainability. As a result, they understand that engineering is rarely about reaching a single best solution; instead, it is about recognizing the trade-offs, balancing conflicting priorities, and making sensible decisions when uncertainty is present.

The more closely the various technologies are interconnected, the more obvious it becomes that it is not enough to have expertise in a single area. ASDL promotes the idea of considering the overall situation, questioning one's own assumptions, and understanding how different parts of a system influence each other. It’s this ability to connect the dots that allows students to deal with the complex problems they will face outside the classroom. As Mavris says, the aim is to turn disciplinarians into systems thinkers.