Members of the School of Engineering's nuclear remediation team - Assistant Professor Gene LeBeouf, Professor Frank Parker, Professor James Clarke and Professor David Kosson - stand in the lab where the long hours of analysis take place.

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, funded by a $2.7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant over five years, focuses education and research on ways to predict the performance and reliability of complex systems and equipment.

The program, which began this academic year, is unique, the first graduate training program in the world to study and develop multidisciplinary mathematical approaches to assessing and managing risk and reliability.

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 teaches 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 like the space shuttle or a suspension bridge.

Sankaran Mahadevan, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, leads the program as principal investigator. He and his team have developed a sophisticated set of mathematical alternatives to physical reliability tests, which typically involve damage or destruction of the equipment or system being evaluated. Enabled by increasingly powerful computing tools and techniques, Mahadevan’s reliability 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 says.

In addition to training Ph.D. 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 IGERT award will lead to development of Vanderbilt as the leading institution for reliability studies worldwide,” says Professor Mahadevan.

The program concentrates research in three areas: (1) large systems reliability and risk, (2) device and component reliability, and (3) uncertainty analysis methods. Large systems include transportation, environmental, aerospace and structural systems. Device and component research includes mechanical, electronic, and software components. Both of these research areas draw from the fundamental research on uncertainty analysis methods. Research findings will be shared with other scientists and engineers through a series of national reliability workshops.

The 35 Ph.D.s in the program participate in a broad-based educational plan 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 includes 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, Halliburton KBR, 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,” Professor Mahadevan says.

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.