Reliability Engineering Students Win Awards at the 2021 SERAD Student Safety Innovation Contest

Annually, the Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division (SERAD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers hosts a challenge in which college students submit papers on Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis topics. Papers submitted to the SERAD Student Safety Innovation Contest are peer reviewed by experts in these areas.

This year, UMD Reliability Engineering doctoral student Yujie Mao, and Civil and Environmental Engineering student Majed Hamed won 3rd place in the graduate students’ category of the challenge. Mao and Hamed's winning paper - Efficiency Optimization of Unweighted and Weighted Railroad Network Topologies – discusses a method they developed, which allows rail planners to optimize a rail network based on its transport efficiency.

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Vincent Paglioni, also a Reliability Engineering doctoral student, received an Honorable Mention Award for his research investigating the use of "static" reliability data to develop deeper insights into the behavior of a repairable component/system. Vincent says a lot of times, the data available is aggregate or static, and gives no indication about the trend of the rate of occurrence of failure. But, using basic engineering assumptions about the system can actually allow engineers to develop dynamic models of the system behavior.

"By incorporating these assumptions into a Monte Carlo model, based on the static data, we can develop multiple models which may describe the system behavior, and allow engineers to investigate the consequences of their assumptions. This paper was originally written for my course project in ENRE 640, and I am very pleased that the IMECE SERAD community recognized its value." - Vincent Paglioni

A 1-page summary of both papers will be published in the quarterly SERAD Newsletter.

Congratulations to the winners!

Published July 8, 2021