A Review of Model-Based and Digital Engineering Research in front of the COVID-19 Challenge

CSD&M 2020

A Review of Model-Based and Digital Engineering Research in front of the COVID-19 Challenge

Speaker:
Dinesh Verma – Professor, Executive Director, Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC)
Dinesh Verma received the Ph.D. (1994) and the M.S. (1991) in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech. He served as the Founding Dean of the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology from 2007 through 2016.  He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a US Department of Defense sponsored University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) focused on systems engineering research. During his fifteen years at Stevens he has successfully proposed research and academic programs exceeding $150m in value.  Verma served as Scientific Advisor to the Director of the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven, Holland from 2003 through 2008. Prior to this role, he served as Technical Director at Lockheed Martin Undersea Systems, in Manassas, Virginia, in the area of adapted systems and supportability engineering processes, methods and tools for complex system development. Before joining Lockheed Martin, Verma worked as a Research Scientist at Virginia Tech and managed the University’s Systems Engineering Design Laboratory. While at Virginia Tech and afterwards, Verma continues to serve numerous companies in a consulting capacity.  He served as an Invited Lecturer from 1995 through 2000 at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His professional and research activities emphasize systems engineering and design with a focus on conceptual design evaluation, preliminary design and system architecture, design decision-making, life cycle costing, and supportability engineering. In addition to his publications, Verma has received three patents in the areas of life-cycle costing and fuzzy logic techniques for evaluating design concepts. Dr. Verma has authored over 100 technical papers, book reviews, technical monographs, and co- authored three textbooks: Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management (Wiley, 1995), Economic Decision Analysis (Prentice Hall, 1998), Space Systems Engineering (McGraw Hill, 2009). He was honored with an Honorary Doctorate Degree (Honoris Causa) in Technology and Design from Linnaeus University (Sweden) in January 2007; and with an Honorary Master of Engineering Degree (Honoris Causa) from Stevens Institute of Technology in September 2008.

Abstract:
This talk will provide a landscape view of the Digital Engineering research portfolio within the SERC – of particular reference given our “new normal” during the COVID 19 era. The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) is a consortium of 22 universities in the United Stated focused on systems research.  It has developed a research strategy with four thematic areas – one of these thematic areas is Systems Engineering and Management Transformation (SEMT).  Within the SEMT thematic area, a lot of the specific research tasks have explored various aspects of Digital Engineering – from the level of engineering data and information with rich semantic interoperability, to the enterprise level need for transformation and managing a cultural change from a cadence that has been developed for document centric engineering to a likely cadence more appropriate for digital engineering, where the design journey is captured in computational space.