Vanderbilt University Register: Vanderbilt wins NSF multidisciplinary grant for reliability, risk engineering program

by Vivian Cooper-Capps

Teaching engineers to design safer and more reliable aircraft, automobiles, environmental remediation projects, buildings, bridges and other, similarly complex engineering systems is the goal of a new program at Vanderbilt University.

The new Multidisciplinary Training in Reliability and Risk Engineering and Management program, to be funded by a $2.7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant over five years, will focus education and research on ways to predict the performance and reliability of complex systems and equipment. The new program will be the first graduate training program in the world to study and develop multidisciplinary mathematical approaches to assessing and managing risk and reliability, according to its principal investigator, Sankaran Mahadevan.

"This award will lead to the development of Vanderbilt as the leading institution for reliability studies worldwide," said Mahadevan, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Drawing from the expertise of 25 faculty members from the School of Engineering, Owen Graduate School of Management, and the College of Arts and Science, the program will teach graduate students to apply multidisciplinary techniques to assess reliability and ultimately create safe, effective, and cost-efficient processes and products.

The program is the first NSF Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training (IGERT) initiative awarded to Vanderbilt.

The Vanderbilt School of Engineering is an international leader in applying computational and experimental techniques to predict risk and reliability for infrastructure, environmental, network, mechanical and electronic systems. These tools are required because traditional reliability assessments are based on physical tests of the equipment or structure being evaluated, which is not cost-effective or even possible for complex systems such as the space shuttle or a suspension bridge.

Vanderbilt's expertise in large-systems reliability and risk, electronics device- and component-level reliability, and uncertainty analysis methods will be combined to develop better analytical tools and to train graduates to use them in projects of importance to the national infrastructure, environment, and several industries and businesses, said Mahadevan.

He and his team have developed a sophisticated set of mathematical alternatives to physical reliability tests that typically involve damage or destruction of the equipment or system being evaluated. Enabled by increasingly powerful computing tools and techniques, these alternative methods use computer modeling and simulation to safely and accurately assess reliability.

"Graduate students who receive the comprehensive, cross-disciplinary training provided in our program will be able to apply these concepts to complex infrastructure, environmental, network, mechanical and electronics systems," he said.

In addition to training doctoral candidates in applying these techniques, the program will foster new research to develop highly integrated computer modeling and simulation methods that incorporate economic, legal, regulatory and social perspectives for reliability and risk management.

The program will concentrate research in three areas: large systems reliability and risk; device and component reliability; and uncertainty analysis methods. Large systems would include transportation, environmental, aerospace and structural systems. Device and component research would include mechanical, electronic and software components. Both of these research areas will draw from the fundamental research on uncertainty analysis methods.

The program will also give students practice in applying science and engineering principles to multi-faceted social and political problems associated with risk and reliability management. Research findings will be shared with other scientists and engineers through a series of national reliability workshops.

The 35 Ph.D.s expected to be trained through the program will participate in a broad-based educational program that includes multidisciplinary coursework and dissertation topics, laboratory rotations, industry and government laboratory internships, seminars, workshops, case studies, and training in professional communication and ethics.

The outreach component of the program will include involvement with undergraduates, high school teachers, industry, government and other academic institutions.

Several government agencies and private industries are participating in the program as summer internship sponsors. Sponsoring organizations that will accept summer interns from the program include Boeing, General Electric, FedEx, General Motors, Xerox, Brown and Root, NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force and the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

"We plan to aggressively recruit graduate students, particularly among those in under-represented groups," Mahadevan said.

The co-principal investigators of the IGERT program are David S. Kosson, professor of civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering; Ronald D. Schrimpf, professor of electrical engineering; Bruce Cooil, associate professor of management; and Gabor Karsai, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering.