Title: Simulation Methods for the Assessment of Reliability of Structural and Mechanical Systems
Keynote Speaker: Professor Carlos Guedes Soares, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract:
The structural reliability methods are presently in a mature state of development and have been used in different fields in the implementation of reliability- and risk-based methodologies for design, maintenance and inspection planning of structural and mechanical systems. The first- and second-order reliability methods (FORM/SORM) have been widely used and accepted for practical applications due to their efficiency, but they have limitations with respect to accuracy and general applicability to complex system reliability problems. The Monte Carlo based simulation methods (MCS) are nowadays a viable alternative to the FORM/SORM methods due to the presently available computational resources and efficient simulation strategies, making feasible their use in a practical engineering context. Presently, they are recognized as the most versatile and robust methods for reliability analysis, which can provide arbitrarily accurate failure probability predictions irrespective of the complexity of the limit states of the system. They overcome the limitations of accuracy and general applicability of the FORM/SORM methods and can provide an error estimate for the failure probability predictions. An overview of different MCS methods for structural reliability analysis will be given in this lecture, with focus on classical variance reduction techniques such as the importance sampling and directional simulation and more advanced methods based on asymptotic techniques and subset simulation.

Speaker’s Biography:
Prof. Carlos Guedes Soares received the M.S. and Ocean Engineer degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 1976, the Ph.D. degree from the Norwegian Institute of Technology, of the University of Trondheim, in 1984, and the Doctor of Science degree from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 1991. He is a Distinguished Professor of the Engineering Faculty (Instituto Superior Tecnico) of the University of Lisbon and the Head of the Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), which is a research center of the University of Lisbon that is recognized and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He has supervised 45 concluded Phd thesis and 36 Pos-doc Researchers. He has coauthored more than 550 journal papers (h index WoS=44) and has been involved in more than 70 international research projects and 30 national projects. He has received Doctor Honoris Causa degrees from the Technical University of Varna in 2003 and the University “Dunarea de Jos” Galati, in 2004. He was founding member and has been General Secretary, Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA). He has been Editor of Reliability Engineering and System Safety (Elsevier) since 1992 and is presently its Editor in Chief.
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Title: Prognostics-Based Qualification for Electronics Components and Systems
Keynote Speaker: Michael Pecht, Chair Professor and Director, CALCE Electronic Products and Systems Center, University of Maryland, USA

Tutorial Abstract:
Today, products are changing very rapidly, customers have more choices, tremendous price pressure exists on suppliers, and there is pressure to test quickly. However, the traditional test and qualification standards have been inadequate in preventing failures. In fact, over the past 10 years, there have been an increasingly large number of electronics that have passed qualification tests but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many companies. This talk will overview why the current qualification methods are inadequate, why the standards need to be replaced and how companies can qualify products in an accelerated manner to ensure acceptable reliability. One new approach pertains to in-situ reliability assessment incorporating a fusion of data recognition and physics-of-failure based prognostics. Prognostics is a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating conditions over time, to predict the future reliability of the product.

Speaker’s Biography:
Prof Michael Pecht is a world renowned expert in strategic planning, design, test, and risk assessment of information systems, including prognostics and systems health management techniques for electronics systems. Prof Pecht has a BS in Physics, an MS in Electrical Engineering and an MS and PhD in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is a Professional Engineer, an SAE Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and an ASME Fellow. He is the editor-in-chief of IEEE Access, and served as chief editor of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability for nine years, and chief editor for Microelectronics Reliability for sixteen years. He has also served on three NAS studies, and two US Congressional investigations in automotive safety. He is the founder and Director of CALCE (Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering) at the University of Maryland, which is funded by over 150 of the world’s leading electronics companies at more than US$6M/year. The CALCE Center received the NSF Innovation Award in 2009 and the National Defense Industries Association Award.  He is currently a Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering and a Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland. He has written more than twenty books on product reliability, development, use and supply chain management.  He has also written a series of books of the electronics industry in China, Korea, Japan and India. He has written over 700 technical articles and has 7 patents. He consults for 22 international companies. In 2015 he was awarded the IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Award for visionary leadership in the development of physics-of-failure-based and prognostics-based approaches to electronics reliability. In 2010, he received the IEEE Exceptional Technical Achievement Award for his innovations in the area of prognostics and systems health management.  In 2008, he was awarded the highest reliability honor, the IEEE Reliability Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Title: Fly-by-Feel Autonomous Electric Vehicles
Keynote Speaker: Fu-Kuo Chang, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, USA

Tutorial Abstract:
It is envisioned that the next generation aerospace vehicles will be eco-friendly and designed towards being fully autonomous and highly intelligent to achieve optimal performance with highest safety assurance for all operational conditions. The vehicles will be equipped with high-resolution state-sensing and self-awareness capabilities to diagnose their health and operating states on a real-time basis, mimicking the sensory skins of biological systems and enabling “fly-by-feel” capabilities. In addition, the vehicles will be powered by hybrid or electric propulsion systems using energy provided by advanced high-energy batteries.  Therefore, the sensing system must be able to process “big” sensor data and monitor/diagnose the actual conditions with advanced diagnostic tools and data processing methods. This requires distributed networks of sensors and microprocessors to be integrated with the vehicles to enable real-time state awareness and health monitoring. The development of the complete battery-powered vehicles will also involve extreme light-weighting to sustain high mobility. Integration of such highly distributed intelligent sensor network systems with a large amount of batteries would create significant technical challenges involving integration of materials, sensors, electronics, batteries, software, network wiring, etc. Based on the current state-of-the­art design and fabrication methods, the current approaches are not adequate to address these challenges to provide reliable and cost-effective solutions. In this presentation, a new class of multifunctional composites will be introduced, which is built upon the structural health monitoring technology that has been studied extensively by the author and his research team. A vision will be presented to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying innovative bio-inspired flexible, stretchable sensors/actuators/electronics networks into composites with embedded electric power storage to form a completely integrated intelligent structural system. Prototypes of the multifunctional composites have been developed and will demonstrate the feasibility of making a fly-by-feel autonomous aircraft with significant weight savings over existing electric vehicle design.

Speaker’s Biography:
Dr. Fu-Kuo Chang is a Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. His primary research interest is in the areas of multi-functional materials and intelligent structures with particular emphases on structural health monitoring, self-sensing diagnostics, intelligent sensor networks, and multifunctional energy storage composites for transportation vehicles as well as safety-critical assets. He has been a recipient of many scientific awards, among them the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Lifetime Achievement Award, IWSHM by Boeing Company (2004), and Life-Time Achievement Award, SPIE NDE/SHM (2010). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Int. J. of Structural Health Monitoring. He is also a Fellow of AIAA and ASME.
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