Computer Science faculty advance engineering informatics

Professor Vasant Honavar of Computer Science will lead, together with Professors James McCalley and Daji Qiao of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor Sarah Ryan of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, and Professor William Meeker of Statistics, a three-year research project funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at automation of information-decision processes involved in managing the operations, maintenance, and planning of the high-voltage electric power transmission systems. This work will advance the state of the art in management of capital-intensive, geographically distributed physical assets in several areas: (a) Sensing and communications; (b) Data Integration; (c) Transforming equipment condition measurements to reliability metrics; (d) Developing and linking multi-time scale stochastic decision algorithms; (e) Valuation of information and subsequent sensor deployment. An important impact of this research will be an increased ability to process and use the massive data streams associated with owning and operating transmission equipment, resulting in better investment, maintenance, and operating decisions, and ultimately, more economic and more reliable delivery of electric power. For more information, see the NSF abstract.