Tang Awarded Dowd Fellowship to Develop Simulations

Supported by the Dowd Fellowship, Professor Pingbo Tang will integrate data-driven simulation games into two existing courses and one new course for “learning operations by trying” experiences with various civil systems. 

Civil systems are engineered systems with many interacting components that collectively deliver services (e.g., water, electricity, traffic). Examples are airports, water treatment plants, power plants, and bridge and road networks. Globalization and urbanization have challenged operating and maintaining those civil systems under increasing demands. The next generation of engineers will routinely carry out dynamic civil system diagnosis, reconfiguration, anomaly recovery, and update to embrace the varying operation pressures. 

Tang plans to develop dynamic decision-making games for operating and maintaining various civil infrastructure systems based on the research data, digital models, and relevant materials accumulated by him over the past decade. The strategy is to develop data-driven simulations of civil infrastructure operation scenarios or infrastructure inspection and maintenance planning scenarios. Then Tang will use those data-driven simulations to develop dynamic decision-making games that allow students to try operation, inspection, and maintenance strategies and observe outcomes. These games cover diverse infrastructure inspection and operation scenarios: 1) bridge inspection and maintenance planning, 2) water treatment plant operation and anomaly recovery, and 3) airport ground operations.

The Philip and Marsha Dowd Fellowship is awarded by the CMU College of Engineering to a faculty member to recognize educational contributions and to encourage the undertaking of an educational project such as textbook writing, educational technology development, laboratory experience improvement, educational software, or course and curriculum development.