Our research is founded on the core disciplines of information engineering, operations engineering and enterprise engineering. These areas can be concisely defined as follows.

Information Engineering – the application of information science, computer science, and mathematics in system design and analysis as it relates to the creation, fusion, processing, management, and deployment of data, information and knowledge.

Operations Engineering – the application of mathematical, scientific, and computational methods to decision problems in engineering design and the modeling and analysis of technical, business, social, and physical systems.

Enterprise Engineering – the application and development of management science and engineering principles to the design and control of enterprises.

Information Engineering employs results from data and knowledge engineering, computational statistics, and information systems to design and provide information infrastructure to support enterprise operations. In contrast to computer science and other related disciplines, information engineering focuses on the design of data and knowledge systems as the organizational nerve center where operations and enterprise systems are integrated. The methodological foundations of Information Engineering are rooted in soft computing, database systems, and forecasting. Emerging areas of research include the fusion, analysis, and management of real time data streams from large scale distributed sources; the design and administration of cyber-infrastructure for digital enterprises; and open connection technology such as Web services, service-oriented architecture, and ontology. Popular application areas encompass the science of collaboration, intelligent transportation, and computerized manufacturing and services.

Operations Engineering employs methods of mathematical programming, queuing theory, computational optimization, agent-based modeling, engineering statistics and discrete event simulation for solving problems related to the design, planning, and operation of complex systems where intelligent coordination is necessary to achieve optimal performance.

Enterprise Engineering employs results from information systems, management, organization theory and microeconomics to design, rationalize, and control large-scale enterprise systems. Operations and enterprise engineering are distinctive from management and economics in the use of an engineering approach to design and plan enterprise processes to optimize performance. Enterprise engineering is distinguished from operations engineering based on its methodological foundations in strategy and policy, entrepreneurship, organization design, production functions, and social networks.

Our Primary Research Themes
Our faculty research aligns directly with these three core strengths, which positions us to exploit dynamically evolving opportunities of high relevance in Computation and Information Technology, Energy and the Environment, and Biotechnology. Our department has identified two primary and five secondary research themes directly linked to our three core strengths. The two primary research themes are Services Engineering and Adaptive Supply Chains. These areas represent two distinct themes that enable our department to capitalize on longstanding intellectual investments and internationally recognized excellence through the scholarly contributions of our faculty.

Services Engineering
Services Engineering requires and spawns significant engineering innovations at the levels of Information, Operations, and Enterprise. It builds on the complementarity of services and manufacturing. A number of our faculty members are recognized for seminal intellectual contributions that have played a major role in defining this field. Our current emphasis in this area aligns our effort with leading industrial programs in research and education and uses this foundation to engage government funding that supports university-industry collaboration. On the basis of the new scientific results and human resources built through this collaboration, we bring the research to the basic science level that the new field recognizes. While there has been a worldwide proliferation of academic and industry conferences in this area with highly visible, leadership participation by our faculty members, there is an open debate about the intellectual nature of services and the need for an entirely new discipline that requires a fundamental engineering research basis characterized by research and new doctoral programs.

Our research examines the use of societal as well as enterprise cyber-infrastructure to produce and provide on-demand services to persons and enterprises that are connected by the same cyber-infrastructure. The key characteristics of these connected services include digital connection, service 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. The characteristics of connected services and the supporting cyber-infrastructure foundation can support massive concurrent virtual configurations and become the enabler and object of innovation to create new types of firms and production functions. We refer to this process as Services Engineering. Our research is aimed at helping to develop, rationalize, and optimize these characteristics to create new valuable services for digitally connected persons, enterprises, and society. In parallel, closely related research in global supply chains and the integration of manufacturing and services involves significant research challenges in optimization, queuing theory, data mining, statistical analysis, and simulation.

Adaptive Supply Chains
Our 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 Information, Operations and Enterprise 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.

As excellent example of DSES led research in this area can be cited in our research into systems for disaster response and recovery. Recent events (in 2005 the earthquake along the borders of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan and three hurricanes along the United States Gulf Coast, in 2004 the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the 2003 electrical grid failure, and in 2001 the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.) 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 civil 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 civil infrastructure or the information infrastructure could negatively impact our economy. - Furthermore, both the civil infrastructure and the information infrastructure could be dependent upon other infrastructures such as electric power and the cyber-infrastructure, i.e., Internet.

In addition to the impact of a disaster on infrastructure and cyber-infrastructure systems, these events require extensive response and recovery efforts that challenge the resiliency and sustainability of supply chains. Government aid agencies and corporations in the region bear the brunt of the effort initially, and focus on safety, security, and health and welfare of the public. If supply chain resources are not sufficient to meet the demands of the response effort, supplementary resources must be mobilized. The event may initiate donations as news of a major disaster or humanitarian crisis is broadcast across the world. For example, the 2004 tsunami in South Asia claimed over 225,000 lives and displaced 1.7 million people. Response to this event included donations of more than $13 billion, which resulted in an unprecedented relief effort. Our research in this area is on the application of Information Engineering, Operations Engineering and Enterprise Engineering tools to improve the ability of supply chains to cope with natural, technological, and willful disasters. Opportunities exist to address issues concerning society’s vulnerability to foreseeable disasters as well as potential mitigation measures. Mitigation and preparedness, however, cannot serve as a sufficient means of dealing with the unforeseen when flexibility and improvisation are needed. Our research scope includes large-scale response and recovery efforts to deal with the impact of disastrous events. Information, Operations and Enterprise Engineering methodologies provide a rigorous architectural approach to planning, analyzing, designing, and implementing coordinated responses to disasters. These techniques provide a means by which supply chains are enabled to maximize their resources, including capital, people, and information to respond to unplanned events of all kinds.

Secondary Research Themes
Other important themes in our department’s research focus on security-relevant applications, energy and the environment, biotechnology, intelligent transportation systems and nanotechnology. Security relevant research relates to application including (i) explosives detection from TeraHertz radiation, (ii) network detection, (v) text mining, (vi) data fusion, and (vii) intent dynamics in social networks. While the importance of most of these applications is obvious, data fusion and intent dynamics provide illustrative examples. The idea of data fusion is 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 boost overall specificity without an unreasonable number of false positives. One of our faculty members was a keynote speaker on data fusion at a specialized workshop between three national laboratories (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory) and the Department of Homeland Security. He will be coordinating a data fusion section at an upcoming Gordon Conference on the detection of explosives. Intent dynamics is another promising security-related application for our research where the idea 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.

Another application-driven research theme in our department is energy and environment. The computational optimization expertise of our faculty members is a natural match for the application of Information and Operations Engineering methodologies in our research related to proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell manufacturing and self-reconfigurable power grids with cyber-infrastructure and distributed sensors. Related areas of research in Information, Operations and Enterprise Engineering in this application area relate to load forecasting, the use of advanced simulation models to assess the impact of global warming, and the application of quantum structure activity relationships for the design of novel polymer materials for use in advanced capacitor batteries.

Biotechnology is another important application area of our research where our research uses computational intelligence for computer-aided drug design which has made a major contribution through the Rensselaer Center for Exploratory Cheminformatics and Chemometrics Research. Other biotechnology applications of our research emphasizes the application of Operations Engineering in the development of new system simulation tools that can be used for solving challenging equations such as the use of cellular automata for multi-phase fluid flow, cellular automata models for electromagnetic field and quantum-mechanical calculations, and the use of cellular automata for modeling the spread of infectious diseases. The use of machine learning techniques for micro-array assessment and the use of text-mining techniques in bioinformatics represent additional areas where our core strengths contribute to biotechnology research.

In partnership with Rensselaer’s Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Studies, our research in intelligent transportation systems investigates the use of information technology to integrate multiple transportations systems, e.g. highways, transit, railroads, maritime, and inland waterways, into a seamless system that delivers significantly improved results. This transformation and its focus on safe, secure, efficient operations with only a few, very targeted, new construction projects presents an opportunity for reducing both energy consumption and environmental impact through the development of new paradigms of decision making that foster an appropriate consideration of the broader impacts of transportation, and efficient transportation operations supported by innovative computing and information technologies. Concurrent with this need to manage traffic operations is the ever-increasing availability of data. Just being able to collect data isn’t enough – computing power must be utilized to store, analyze, and present the information that can be mined from this vast amount of real-time, “streaming” data. Represents a significant technical challenge.

Our core research strengths in Information, Operations and Enterprise Engineering also augment and complement research in nanotechnology and future chips through the use of computational optimization and genetic algorithms for interconnect problems in 3-D chip layouts. The use of cheminformatics techniques for the development of specific materials such as the design of new polymers for capacitor batteries, and the design of polymers with specific semi-conductor properties for a new class of solid-state devices are examples of other related applications of our research in this area.