ISyE faculty and students are engaged in a wide range of analysis of energy, industrial, infrastructure, and natural systems, investigating their functioning principals and their environmental and economic impacts.
ISyE’s sustainable systems researchers bring a strong methodological capability including:
- Sustainability methods such as environmental life-cycle assessment and physical energy and material analysis.
- Operations research and industrial engineering methods including optimization, game theory, and financial engineering.
- Collaborations to integrate climate models, air quality models, and chemical process models into sustainability and operations research types of models.
The combination of these modeling and quantitative approaches are allowing ISyE faculty and students to improve our understanding of existing and future engineered systems, and to provide a stronger basis for innovation, investment, and policy.
After studying the efficiency of honeybees, Craig Tovey and colleagues realized that bees and computer servers had strikingly similar barriers to efficiency. They then worked to translate bee strategy for idle Internet servers improving and inspiring a new server strategy.
Current Research Topics
- Integration of health impact costs into the design and management of energy systems.
- Financial approaches to the management of energy and carbon markets.
- Environmental life-cycle assessment of biofuels and bioproducts.
- Least-cost approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts.
- The functioning of natural systems including ants and honeybees.
- Analysis of resilience and sustainability in integrated energy, water, and transportation systems.
