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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.
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