The department's faculty research aligns directly with our core strengths in Industrial and Information Systems to exploit dynamically evolving opportunities of high relevance. The primary research thrusts with the DSES department are described below:

Adaptive Supply Chains
Adaptive Supply Chains deals with the logistics of deploying finite resources to assemble, transport, sustain and distribute people, goods and information to facilitate the fulfillment of demand associated with economic commerce, national defense, disaster response, and/or humanitarian aid. The focus of this research 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.

Homeland Security/Social Networks
Homeland Security/Social Networks relates to development of decision technologies focused on the application of artificial intelligence, soft computing, data fusion, information systems, and data mining. Key applications include threat detection in social networks, issues of trust and ethical decision making, emergent and improvisational organizational responses to natural and unnatural disasters, and group and individual behavior in dynamic social systems. Much of our work in Homeland Security/Social Networks lies at the intersection of operations research, systems engineering, management and psychology. The unifying thread of this research is the enhancement of the information value chain from data, to information, to knowledge to decision making. An illustrative example is provided in DSES research using data fusion and computational intelligence to build automated diagnostic systems to enhance security-related detection, increase specificity and minimize false positives. This research has yielded practical techniques and algorithms to model decision maker behavior for automated mining of media files and social network communications leading to the detection of interesting and unusual events. Additional applications in computer-aided drug design, bioinformatics, and the detection of improvised explosive devices have proven to be remarkably successful in practice.