Many complex engineering systems involve interactions among a large number of agents with coupled dynamics and decisions due to their shared environment and resources. Such systems are often operated using a hierarchical architecture, where a coordinator determines some macroscopic control signal to steer the population to achieve a desired group objective while respecting local preferences and constraints for individual agents. Examples include electricity demand response programs, ground and air transportation systems, data center power management, robotic networks, among others.

This project advances the scientific knowledge on design methods for improving the resilience of civil infrastructures to disruptions. To improve resilience, critical services in civil infrastructure sectors must utilize new diagnostic tools and control algorithms that ensure survivability in the presence of both security attacks and random faults, and also include the models of incentives of human decision makers in the design process.

Overall Objective. The goal of this project is to facilitate the timely retrieval of dynamic situational awareness information from field deployed nodes by an operational center in disaster recovery or search and rescue missions, which are typically characterized by resource-constrained uncertain environments. Efficient situational awareness information retrieval under severe resource limitations is critical in applications like disaster response.

Challenge:   Manage demand-supply imbalance in the power grid with a high degree of intermittent renewable energy (solar and wind) without using expensive batteries Solution:   Providing Virtual Energy Storage (VES) through demand manipula/on of consumer loads, while maintaining consumers’ quality of service  Three innovations: 

Performance monitoring data (e.g., measurements, logs, events) are becoming increasingly accessible and abundant (in terms of cost and availability) in modern distributed complex systems such as computer systems and networks, integrated buildings, industrial systems, transportation networks and power-grids. With efficient exploration of such data, health monitoring, diagnosis and prognosis can be greatly improved beyond the current state-of-the-art.

The recent increase in the variety and usage of wearable sensing systems allows for the continuous monitoring of health and wellness of users. The output of these systems enable individuals to make changes to their personal routines in order to minimize exposures to pollutants and maintain healthy levels of exercise. Furthermore, medical practitioners are using these systems to monitor proper activity levels for rehabilitation purposes and to monitor threatening conditions such as heart arrhythmias.

Our research addresses urgent challenges in high confidence testing of automotive systems due to on-going and anticipated introduction of advanced, connected, and autonomous vehicle technologies.  We pursue the development of tools for maneuver and data optimization to determine test trajectories and scenarios to facilitate vehicle testing.   Our approaches exploit game theoretic traffic interaction modeling to inform in-traffic relevant trajectories, model-free optimization to identify trajectories falsifying time domain specifications, and the development of Smart Black Box