We are exploring systems engineering solutions to problems related to the reliability, resilience, and economic impacts of networks. Applications range from infrastructure networks, including protection-interdiction-restoration models and the impacts of false claim attacks on our infrastructure, to supply chain networks, including resilient supplier selection decision-making and supplier survivability, to community networks, including pandemic economic impact analyses and climate-driven refugee resettlement optimization, and beyond. With an interest in Systems Engineering for Societal Good, we are always looking for new cross-disciplinary collaborations. A few applications are detailed below.
Understanding how networks fail and recover from disruptions is critical for designing infrastructure systems, along with the communities that rely upon them, that can withstand and adapt to an increasingly uncertain world. Our work includes formulations to optimally restore disrupted networks, with extensions addressing community structures, resilience-informed component importance measures, restoration crew routing, and societal vulnerability. Protection-interdiction-restoration formulations more effectively represent all characteristics of resilience, and we have developed new exact and hybrid solution techniques for these difficult tri-level optimization problems. Additionally, game theory helps us understand how collaboration occurs in interdependent infrastructure network restoration decision processes.
As society becomes increasingly connected through digital platforms, the deliberate spread of false information poses a growing security threat to infrastructure systems, where fabricated claims about system failures or safety hazards can trigger real-world consequences ranging from public panic to misallocated emergency resources. By integrating disinformation spread models with network optimization models, we examine how weaponized false claim attacks could adversely impact electric power networks, multi-commodity rail networks, subway systems, and other public transit. Recent extensions apply causal failure models across interconnected information and physical layers and model the disruptive impacts that disinformation can have on supply chains.
Global supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to disruptions from natural disasters, geopolitical instability, and economic shocks, making resilience essential for maintaining manufacturing continuity and national competitiveness. This challenge is especially pressing for industries that depend on rare earth minerals and other critical materials sourced from sole suppliers, where a single disruption can halt production lines and ripple across entire economic sectors. Our ongoing work addresses supply chain visibility under uncertain network relationships, as well as supply chain design and facility location for critical mineral supply chains. Earlier research explored production scheduling risk under a variety of disruptions to the manufacturing environment.
As extreme weather events, unlivable temperatures, and resource scarcity render regions increasingly uninhabitable, proactive planning for climate-induced migration is essential to ensure displaced populations can be resettled in ways that support both human dignity and community stability. We apply systems engineering tools to this large-scale challenge, developing formulations that address uncertainties in demand for relocation, the temporal nature of decisions, and coordination among multiple decision-makers allocating resources. By integrating social science perspectives into our optimization models, we address measures of social integration, relocation success, and fairness in resource allocation.