The department's faculty research aligns directly with our core strengths in Industrial and Information Systems to exploit dynamically evolving opportunities of high relevance in such areas as Adaptive Supply Chains, Homeland Security, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Energy and the Environment, Biotechnology and Services Engineering.

Adaptive Supply Chains

The department's research in adaptive supply chains deals with the logistics of efficiently deploying finite resources to assemble, transport, sustain and distribute people and goods, thereby facilitating the fulfillment of demand associated with economic commerce, national defense, disaster response, and/or humanitarian aid. Our focus is on efficient and integrated coupling of supply with distribution network resources from a total integrated systems perspective. The functional scope of Adaptive Supply Chains spans production/procurement, materials management, storage, transport, routing, warehousing, dispatching, delivery, and service. Its contextual scope spans production, transportation, military, health, maritime, and communications systems. All of these systems are characterized by complex interdependencies where methodologies of Industrial and Information Systems Engineering can address major challenges in both the ability of supply chains to adapt to evolutionary change and to respond to planned and unplanned disruptive events. The current body of design and modeling research in this area focuses on life-cycle cost minimization under steady state conditions, sequential supply and demand management, and predictable asset and material values. This traditional approach is clearly insufficient to deal with the challenges that will be posed for supply chains in the 21st century, where criteria related to resiliency and sustainability will challenge cost as a dominant driver in decision making. Research is needed to expand the theoretical frameworks for understanding, modeling, and simulating interdependent supply chains under short-term disruptive conditions as well as their adaptability over evolutionary life cycles.

An excellent example of our research in this area is in systems for disaster response and recovery. Recent events remind us of the global importance of natural, technological, and willful disasters. Such critical events precipitate a wide range of impacts on the interconnected, complex systems that constitute our infrastructure for food, transportation, power, housing, and medical supplies. These technological systems are more vulnerable because they are interdependent; disruptions in one can spread to others, causing cascading and potentially catastrophic failures. This vulnerability is exacerbated by advances in communications and computing technologies that are now integral to the operations of our infrastructure systems. For example, efficient and effective global supply chains such as those used by Wal-Mart and Dell could not function without both the logistical infrastructure to collect, store, and move goods and the information to monitor and control the flow of those goods over the network. Therefore, disruptions to either the logistical infrastructure or the information infrastructure could negatively impact our economy. Furthermore, both the logistical infrastructure and the information infrastructure could be dependent upon other infrastructures such as electric power and the cyber-infrastructure, i.e., Internet.

Other Important Research Themes

Other important themes in DSES research focus on Homeland Security/Social Dynamics, Energy and the Environment, Biotechnology, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Services Engineering. Homeland security and social dynamics research in DSES relates to applications including (i) cyber security, (ii) text mining, (iii) data fusion, and (iv) intent dynamics in social networks. Data fusion represents a set of methodologies intended to build better diagnostic systems by combining different individual diagnostic techniques in such a way that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. One of the key drivers for data fusion is the need to boost the performance of different security-related detection techniques to increase overall specificity without an unreasonable number of false positives. Intent dynamics is another promising security-related application where the goal is to automatically identify in media files the occurrence of interesting and unusual events. An obvious application is the flagging of unusual events in sensor-based or camera-based surveillance systems.

DSES research in Energy and the Environment models self-reconfigurable power grids with cyber-infrastructure and distributed sensors using agent-based methodologies. Related DSES research in this application area involves load forecasting, advanced simulation models to assess the impact of climate change, and proton exchange membrane fuel cell manufacturing. DSES research in Biotechnology uses computational intelligence for computer-aided drug design, simulation tools for modeling the spread of infectious diseases, and the development of text-mining techniques in bioinformatics. DSES research in Services Engineering builds on the complementarity of services and manufacturing in applying cyber-infrastructure to produce and provide on-demand, mass-customized services. The key characteristics of these services include scalability, asynchronous co-production, and human-centered assistance through cyber-infrastructure. A signature technical foundation is extended cyber-infrastructure, which couples embedded data and metadata, knowledge, and analytics with computing and telecommunications infrastructure.