Systems engineering team wins award at West Point competition for project Design of COVID-Safe Airport

4429684e-ae8d-405e-870a-3b7aefe68162 (Martha Bushong) — Thu, 06 May 2021 10:02:03 +0000

Systems engineering team wins award at West Point competition for project Design of COVID-Safe Airport 4429684e-ae8d-… Thu, 05/06/2021 - 06:02

In This Story

George Donohue

“Air transportation is a critical engine of the economy,” says Charlie Wang a senior system engineering major. “Not only does it provide rapid, safe, and relatively inexpensive transportation over long distances, there are 750,000 direct U.S. airline jobs and an estimated 10 million jobs in the supply chain. More than 75% of these employees were furloughed or laid off. We had to do something to address this problem.”

That is why Wang and his team of system engineers chose to explore the challenge of keeping passengers safe in the age of COVID with their Senior Design Capstone project.

The team conducted an in-depth analysis of the contagious properties of the virus and the sequence of events in which passengers are processed while traveling on an airline. For this work they won Best Paper - Decision Analysis Track at the General Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference (GDRKMCC-21) hosted by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

“As passengers travel, there is a sequence of stages in which they have to queue or be in close proximity. Examples include bag check, TSA, waiting in the lounge, boarding, on the aircraft, etc. At each one of these stages, airborne contagion is possible depending on the presence of infected passengers, their viral load, and their proximity to others” says team member Michael Strain.

“The process is too complex to analyze mathematically and relies on the interaction of a large number of probabilities,“ explains team member Dongwan Lim. “Examples of these probabilities are the probability of a random passenger at the airport being infected, the probability of proximity to other passengers in the queues, the probability of dispersion of the viral load, the probability of being in queue for longer than a time threshold, …etc. To manage this we had to build a simulation.”

“In systems engineering, we know that a multi-layered defense is better than a single layer,” says team member Bryan Kurt Fabela. “So we looked at mandatory masking, social distancing, temperature checks, contact tracing, and more. You name it, we looked at it. We even looked at the difference between surgical and non-surgical masks.”

After running the simulation using a Monte Carlo approach, the team found that the most cost-effective approach depended heavily on the base rate of infection in the community.

Wang says, “Like everything in life, there is a trade-off between benefits and cost, but the most cost-effective options are mandatory surgical masking, temperature checks, and enforced social-distancing. Speeding up processing in the queues, such as TSA and airplane boarding, is also important because it improves social distancing and reduces exposure times.”

“This was a non-trivial systems problem,” says System Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) Professor George Donohue and sponsor of this project. “Too many times in society we jump to a solution without fully understanding the inter-relationships, unintended consequences, and life-cycle costs. This student team demonstrated the power of systems engineering to strip away the noise and focus on the important issues.”

The team will also be briefing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local airport authorities.

Team members included: Charles Wang, Michael Strain, Daniel Lim, and Bryan Fabela

Topics

Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Senior Capstone Project

Volgenau School of Engineering

coronavirus; covid-19

Operations researcher helps to halt trade of counterfeit PPE

Anonymous — Tue, 04 May 2021 16:35:41 +0000

Operations researcher helps to halt trade of counterfeit PPE Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/04/2021 - 12:35

State officials across the country have seized counterfeit N95 masks. Sometimes, they were caught when entering the country, some were on the brink of being distributed to hospital workers, and others had to be recalled right out of the hands of nurses.

But it isn’t enough to simply know how to spot them once they arrive at the doorsteps of hospitals and essential workers, and a multidisciplinary team has formed at Mason to disrupt the illicit supply chain of counterfeit PPE by identifying the source of counterfeiting respirators and how they enter legitimate supply chains.

Edward Huang from the College of Engineering and Computing and Louise Shelley from the Schar School of Policy and Government received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to combine their expertise and analyze the supply chain for counterfeit goods coming into the United States.

Their project has three parts. The first part is understanding how the illicit supply chains work. The research team will use data and cybersecurity measures to learn how payments are processed, how they are hosting their websites, and how they communicate. “They need to find customers, and the internet is their best way to do that. Criminals usually set up websites, and we can look at those websites to learn where and who they are,” says Huang.

They will also examine the transportation of the goods. “Eventually, they ship to the United States. We are looking at the transportation systems where counterfeiting goods enter legitimate supply chains like airports or seaports,” says Huang.

Fully understanding the path illicit goods take to get into the country allows them to move onto the next step, constructing descriptions of the supply chain that can help find ways to disrupt it. “This kind of criminal activity, if we analyze the people behind it and their overall supply chain, we can find patterns,” says Huang.

Their analysis will eventually lead to studying strategies that government and corporate stakeholders can take to disrupt the chain before it reaches our shores.

Huang and Shelley’s work combines artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data mining, sociological analysis, policy, and more to find patterns that can be disrupted in the supply chain. “As engineers, we have the ability to use these tools like data mining to do great work, but we have to know which questions to ask,” says Huang.

Their five-year grant also includes funding to hire undergraduate students, one in the Schar School and one in the College of Engineering and Computing’s Department of Cyber Security Engineering. Together, the multidisciplinary team’s real-world implementation strategies can help halt the illicit supply chain altogether.

Already, the team has noticed that some counterfeiters are involved in two or three types of illicit activity. “We noticed some of these criminals switched to counterfeit PPE last year because of the pandemic,” says Huang. And it is knowledge like this that helps them understand illicit supply chains long-term and their convergence.

“Counterfeit masks are nearly everywhere during the pandemic. 3M reported more than 38 million counterfeit respirators since March 2020,” says Huang.

Topics

Operations Research

coronavirus; covid-19