Research

Research Interests

My general area of expertise is Systems and Control Engineering. I am a member of the Systems Laboratory in the EECS Department and also a member of the University of Michigan's Controls Group in the College of Engineering.
My research interests are in Discrete Event Systems (DES), including modeling, analysis, supervisory control, optimal control, and diagnosis of this class of dynamical systems. I am also working on applications of DES in computer and communication systems and in software systems.
For further information about Discrete Event Systems please consult the website of the IEEE Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems.

TerraSwarm Project: The TerraSwarm Research Center, funded by the STARnet Program. In this project, I am interested in security and privacy issues in cyber-physical systems.

ExCAPE Project: Expeditions in Computer Aided Program Engineering. This new project, recently funded by NSF, is a collaborative effort involving 18 researchers from 9 academic institutions. In this project, I am particularly interested in applying control synthesis techniques from the field of discrete event systems to the general problem of program synthesis. I am co-lead of the Education and Knowledge Transfer thrust and member of the Executive Committee of this Expeditions grant.

Gadara Project: Deadlock avoidance in concurrent software using discrete control theory. Currently funded by NSF and HP Labs.

Cyber-Physical Systems Project: Control of distributed cyber-physical systems under partial information and limited communication. Currently funded by NSF.

Modular Strategies for Internetwork Monitoring Project: Detection and classification of spatially distributed network anomalies. This project was funded by NSF from 2003-2010.

"Distributed and Fault-Tolerant Control of Discrete-Event Systems": This project was funded by NSF from 2006-2010. Our main results include: (i) modular algorithms for controller synthesis that exploit structural properties of the system, expressed as parallel composition of automata or place-bordered Petri nets, and abstraction; (ii) fault-tolerant diagnosis and control architectures that are robust to certain classes of system faults, sensor faults, and diagnosis module faults; and (iii) efficient synthesis of sensor activation and communication strategies for control and diagnosis of distributed systems. Publications are available at the Publications page.

Please also consult the Discrete Event Systems Group (UMDES) website for further information about my research activities (including software tools).

Please consult the Students page of the UMDES website for the list of my current and former students.