Abstract: Resilience implies the ability of a system to withstand adverse events and recover from the effects of the adverse events. Inspired by resilient activities in ecology and other non-engineering fields in responding to and recovering from catastrophic adverse events, the research objective is to adapt resilience to engineering design and operation domains in order to create failure resilient energy systems. To realize engineered resilience, a new paradigm for engineering design under uncertainty is developed, which enables concurrent development of reliable system functions and proactive prognosis of function failures. Failure prognosis plays an important role in realizing engineered resilience since it detects, diagnoses, and predicts system-wide effects of adverse events, therefore enables a proactive approach to deal with system failures. This talk will introduce the resilience concept and system design and operational challenges, and then present recent advances achieved in design, especially under different scenarios when data related to system failures is rare or abundantly but indirectly available. Practical engineering applications on battery energy storage systems at different scales will be used to demonstrate the advances.

Bio: Dr. Pingfeng Wang is currently a professor and holds the Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar and the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Faculty Scholar in Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois. Dr. Wang’s expertise lies in the field of engineering design for reliability and failure resilience, and prognostics and health management, where he focuses on developing new design methods and computational tools to improve resilience of engineered systems. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the ASME design automation Young Investigator Award. Dr. Wang’s research is currently supported by NSF, DOD, DOE, DOT, and private industry and nonprofit sponsors. Dr. Wang is the review editor for journal of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization and the Associate Editor for Journal of Mechanical Design.