EES Seminar: Leveraging Biologically Inspired Design to Improve System Resilience, Bryan Watson, Embry-Riddle

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Modern life is enhanced by complex systems of interacting agents, including financial systems, power infrastructure, and transportation networks. The response of a these complex systems to unexpected subsystem failures, however, undermines its effectiveness and could mitigate the advantages of combining constituent systems. The increased complexity of Systems of Systems and multi-layer interaction effects hamper the use of traditional System Engineering approaches (e.g. design by decomposition) to increase the resilience. Resilience is an emergent property that describes the ability to resist faults, minimize disruption during a fault, and recover from a fault. One approach to increase resilience is using biologically inspired design to increase resilience. In this talk, Bryan Watson will present an overview of complex systems, the need for increased resilience, the property of emergence, and why biologically inspired design was chosen as an approach to increase resilience. A brief discussion of why system and System-of-Systems level thinking is of interest to all engineers will be presented. The presentation will then pivot to the problem of faulted agents within complex systems and walk through a full bio-inspired design case study. An approach to mitigate the spread of peer-to-peer network attacks inspired by the Zombie Ant Fugus (Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis). Agent-based models are presented and justified. The talk closes with a discussion of the future direction of Biologically Inspired Design for Resilience (BID4R) including implications from the Alle Effect for future work. This talk will be of interest to any engineer who studies network science, systems engineering, resilience, system modeling, or designs artifacts that interact with larger systems or SoS.

Bryan Watson, PE earned his Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his B.S. in Systems Engineering at the United States Naval Academy. After completing his undergraduate degree, Bryan joined the nuclear Navy, serving as a submarine officer onboard the U.S.S Louisville and at the Naval Prototype Training Unit from 2009-2017. Significant milestones include earning the Master Training Specialist Certification, Nuclear Professional Engineer Certification, two Naval Achievement Medals, the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal, and a Naval Commendation Medal. Following his transition from active duty, Bryan earned his PhD as a member of both the Computation and Advancement of Sustainable Systems Lab, where he developed a new method for distributed system demand estimation, and at the Sustainable Design and Manufacturing lab, where his work focused on increasing System of System resilience. Bryan’s work has been published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Journal of Mechanical Design, and IEEE’s Systems Journal. He is a 2021 Pat Tillman Scholar and recipient of the NSF GRFP. At Embry-Riddle, Bryan leads the Biologically Inspired Design-for-Resilience Lab (BID4R Lab). His work is focused on investigating the use of biologically inspired design to increase the resilience of modern systems. The goal of their work is more reliable services to users, increased user safety, and increased sustainability for connected manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure systems.