Zimo Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and student of Dr. Satish T.S. Bukkapatnam, recently won first place at the annual Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference (ISERC) held in Montreal, Canada. Wang competed in the Quality Control and Reliability Engineering category with his paper titled “Change detection in complex systems using Dirichlet process Gaussian state machine.”
Every year the ISERC holds competitions for the best papers in 26 different categories, ranging from energy to homeland security. All submissions must be original research and must be written entirely by the student. The category Wang entered focuses on the quality systems side of industrial engineering that looks at how durable a product is, what the chances are for defective parts, and how to detect those defects or potential failures and thus save significant material wastage and rework costs.
Wang’s paper focused on creating a model that could account for nonlinear and nonstationary conditions of real world processes. Rarely does a system exist in a stationary context, however, most systems models used for change detection assume the underlying dynamic transients are negligible. This assumption can slow or completely hide the detection of subtle changes in behaviors that can lead to catastrophes. Wang’s research developed a model that can realize very minute changes to real world systems that would be otherwise undetectable.