Reliability Life Cycle Management for Engineered Systems

Professor George Vachtsevanos
Professor Emeritus
Georgia Institute of Technology
USA
E-mail: george.vachtsevanos@ece.gatech.edu
 

Abstract: Engineered systems are becoming more complex and by necessity more unreliable resulting in detrimental events for the system itself and its operator. There is evidence to support the contention that industrial and manufacturing processes, transportation and aerospace systems, among many others, are subjected to severe stresses, external and internal, that contribute to increased cost, operator workload, frequent and catastrophic mishaps that require the development and application of new and innovative technologies to improve system reliability, safety, availability and maintainability. These requirements are not true only for strictly engineered systems but are often discussed in business and finance, biological systems and social networks. We introduce in this talk a systematic and verifiable methodology to improve system reliability, reduce operating costs and optimize system design or maintenance practices. The enabling technologies build upon modeling tools to represent critical system functions, a prognostic strategy to predict the long-term behavior of systems under stress, reliability analysis methods exploiting concepts of probabilistic design and an optimization algorithm to arrive at optimum system design for improved reliability. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach with examples from the engineering domain.

Short biography: Dr. George Vachtsevanos is currently serving as Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He served as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1984 until September, 2007. Dr Vachtsevanos directs at Georgia Tech the Intelligent Control Systems laboratory where faculty and students began research in diagnostics in 1985 with a series of projects in collaboration with Boeing Aerospace Company funded by NASA and aimed at the development of fuzzy logic based algorithms for fault diagnosis and control of major space station subsystems. His work in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles dates back to 1994 with major projects funded by the U.S. Army and DARPA. He has served as the Co-PI for DARPA�s Software Enabled Control program over the past six years and directed the development and flight testing of novel fault-tolerant control algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. He has represented Georgia Tech at DARPA�s HURT program where multiple UAVs performed surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking missions in an urban environment. Under AFOSR sponsorship, the Impact/Georgia Team is developing a biologically-inspired micro aerial vehicle. His research work has been supported over the years by ONR, NSWC, the MURI Integrated Diagnostic program at Georgia Tech, the U,S. Army�s Advanced Diagnostic program, General Dynamics, General Motors Corporation, the Academic Consortium for Aging Aircraft program, the U.S. Air Force Space Command, Bell Helicopter, Fairchild Controls, among others. He has published over 300 technical papers and is the recipient of the 2002-2003 Georgia Tech School of ECE Distinguished Professor Award and the 2003-2004 Georgia Institute of Technology Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award. He is the lead author of a book on Intelligent Fault Diagnosis and Prognosis for Engineering Systems published by Wiley in 2006..