Project title

Team members
Date

Note: materials for this template are adapted from the course textbook and supplementary materials (Ford & Coulston, 2008); please refer to chapter 2 for additional details and samples of each of the sections below. Please do not alter in any way the styles in this document. This paragraph should be removed before you submit your problem statement. This document is to be submitted as a DOCX file; no other format will be accepted.

1  Need

Write a 200-300 word statement that identifies the needs of the project. The need statement should:

-  Briefly and clearly state the need being addressed

-  Not provide a solution to the problem

-  Provide supporting information collected as outlined in section 2.4 of the textbook

-  Provide any supporting statistics and anecdotes that support the need

-  Describe current limitations

-  Describe supporting processes that are needed to understand the need.

2  Objective

Write a 100-200 word statement describing the concept proposed to meet the needs identified. It should:

-  Summarize what is being proposed

-  Provide some preliminary design objectives (detailed requirements are developed later)

-  Provide a preliminary description of the technical solution, avoiding a detailed description of the implementation. Often the input and output behavior of the system are described. The complete solution is not usually posted until after the engineering requirements are fully determined.

3  Background and technology survey

Provide a summary (1000-2000 words) of the research survey you conducted. The objectives of this section are to:

-  Provide your audience (faculty, project sponsors, other students, etc.) with sufficient background so that they understand the problem the team plans to solve

-  Demonstrate that the team has a sufficient understanding of the problem to proceed to the next stage of development

-  Demonstrate that the team has conducted research and understands the technology relevant to this project – namely, related solutions to the problem and their limitations. Depending on the project, you should also conduct searches on the US patent database for similar technologies

-  Describe what is new/unique in the proposed objective

-  Provide additional supporting information that for the Need and Objective statements

Pointers:

-  You may provide more detail on the need for the project. For example, if this has market potential, indicate what the size of the market is. If you are preventing injuries – how many injuries are there per year? Supporting statistics are always great to demonstrate the need

-  If there are similar systems out there, describe limitations of current designs or technology. Benchmarking or strength/weaknesses analyses of existing technologies are powerful

-  Describe any basic theory to be described regarding the technology. For example, say you are designing a flywheel energy storage system – you should describe the basics of how flywheel energy systems work – what are the major systems, etc.

-  Pictures always help - be sure to provide a caption describing the contents of the figure

On the writing itself:

-  This is expected to be well-written prose

-  You must provide a references section. Reference all sources used – do not plagiarize. If you use a figure that is not yours, you must provide a clear reference as to where it came from – if not it is plagiarism (in which case you get a zero and reported for academic integrity hearings).

-  Please follow the APA citation standard for references; see (University of Arizona Libraries, 2014) Make sure that all your references are complete, and that web pages are referenced properly. In particular, please don’t include URLs in the body of the document (e.g. http://www.library.arizona.edu/search/reference/citation-apa.html); instead, add them as a reference (University of Arizona Libraries, 2014). We recommend you use EndNote (not to be confused with Evernote), which contains the APA citation style –among many others, and is available to students for free at the Texas A&M Software Center.

-  All figures/tables must have associated captions describing the contents of the figure/table. Each figure or table in the document must be cross-referenced at least once in the text; e.g., as we do here for Table 1 and Figure 1. YouTube contains a number of tutorials describing how to use captions or cross-references in MS-Word

4  Marketing requirements

List the marketing requirements (numbered) as short statements describing the user needs (10-20 needs typically).

5  Objective tree

Organize the user needs in a hierarchical representation based on functional similarity with the relative weights of the needs identified –see Figure 1. Please refer to section 2.4 in the textbook for additional details. Include the pairwise comparison matrices (e.g., table 2.1 in the textbook) you used for ranking needs.

Figure 1. Objective tree for a portable audio device for runners (from the textbook)

Table 1. Pairwise comparison matrix for a portable audio device for runners (from the textbook)

High-Q audio / Portable / Easy to use / Weight
High-Q audio / 1 / 1/3 / 2 / 0.24
Portable / 3 / 1 / 4 / 0.62
Easy-to-use / 1/2 / 1/4 / 1 / 0.14

6  References

Ford, R. M., & Coulston, C. S. (2008). Design for electrical and computer engineers : theory, concepts, and practice. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

University of Arizona Libraries. (2014). American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide, from http://www.library.arizona.edu/search/reference/citation-apa.html

TAMU CSCE 482/483 Problem statement 1/3