The College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara has been named by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to a prestigious university/industry consortium to research robust uncertainty management. The project will be led at UCSB by Igor Mezic, professor of mechanical engineering, and Andrzei Banazuk, technical fellow, at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) in East Hartford, Conn.

The $12.5-million contract goes to a consortium of five universities and UTRC to study robust uncertainty management in large networks exhibiting complex dynamics. UCSB will receive $2.3 million from the three-year grant. This will make it the recipient of the largest academic subcontract in the program. Participating institutions also include Caltech, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.

“DARPA is particularly interested in surveillance networks which involve thousands of aerial, unmanned search vehicles that collaborate to find an object of interest,” said Mezic. “But the same techniques could be used to predict the consequences of a tree branch hitting a power line, causing a blackout to a large portion of the national power grid—as one did in New York in August 2003—and could help decision-making under uncertainty in corporate environments.”

UCSB, UTRC, and Caltech first received seed funding from DARPA for research on this topic three years ago. That research led to a redesign of commercially available jet engines produced by Pratt & Whitney.