Using a marketplace to form multidisciplinary systems engineering capstone project teams

Our previous research has shown that multidisciplinary capstone projects can enhance development of Systems Engineering (SE) competencies. However, undergraduate engineering capstone projects typically focus on only one engineering discipline. In order to assist faculty and students in forming multidisciplinary teams, a marketplace for multidisciplinary SE capstone projects has been created by a Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) project conducted at Stevens Institute of Technology. The marketplace enables potential project sponsors to advertise opportunities to a broad audience of potential student teams representing a variety of engineering disciplines. It also allows students the opportunity to form their own teams based on common interests and complementary skills. In our pilot year the capstone marketplace offered a variety of challenging projects to several engineering schools. In one case, students from three different disciplines at two universities created a capstone project that engaged two different project sponsors with similar interests and needs. This effort, referred to as the Dual-Use Ferry project, investigated the design of safe ferry transports that could also serve to deploy emergency relief supplies in the event of a natural catastrophe. Multidisciplinary student engineering teams face a number of challenges that do not arise within single disciplinary teams. Similarly, teams formed from multiple universities need to work more diligently to stay connected than do teams that can meet face- To-face easily. It was determined that SE concepts and techniques helped the students on the Dual-Use Ferry project overcome some of the disciplinary and distance barriers that might otherwise have prevented them from working together effectively. It was also found that these types of teams require more discipline and attention to scheduling and communication issues as well as awareness of interdependencies between the different tasks than single disciplinary single university capstone projects.