Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Oli de Weck (MIT)

Description

Blurring the Boundary: Integrating Systems of Systems at the Edge of Earth and Space

Traditionally, human exploration and robotic probes operating in Earth’s oceans, on land, in the air, and in outer space have been viewed as completely isolated from each other. Thanks to new technologies and systems theories we now see the emergence of collaborative system of systems.  These jointly provide flexible and resilient mission capabilities for scientific work, ecosystems monitoring, and persistent presence of human and robotic agents. This seminar presents several examples of such systems including PEARL, an autonomous ocean surface vehicle that communicates via satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Ouroborous a suborbital spacecraft refueling experiment that flew above the Kármán line on New Shepard NS-17, the development of the logistics architecture of the new Orbital Reef Space Station in collaboration with Blue Origin, and finally the development of a robust In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) infrastructure to provide oxygen and water for a future human settlement on Mars. Beyond these individual applications we will highlight the underlying theoretical underpinnings of future systems of systems including network and graph theory, discrete event simulation as well as agent-based modeling, both during planning and operations.

Bio:
Olivier de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned degrees in Industrial Engineering from ETH Zurich and Aerospace Systems from MIT (S.M. ’99, Ph.D. ’01) where he is the director of the Engineering Systems Laboratory. His main research is in Systems Engineering with a focus on how complex technological systems, such as satellites and launch vehicles, are designed and optimized and how they evolve over time. Methodological contributions that his group has made include Time-expanded Decision Networks (U.S. patent 8,260,652), Generalized Multi-Commodity Network Flows (GMCNF), as well as software tools such as SpaceNet and HabNet. He is a Fellow of AIAA and a former chair of its Space Logistics Technical Committee. He helped develop the first integrated model of the Next Generation Space Telescope (now JWST) and the concept of interplanetary supply chains. He has authored or co-authored over 400 publications for which he has been recognized with twelve best paper awards since 2004. Prof. de Weck previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Systems Engineering from 2013-2018 and is a former Senior Vice President of Technology Planning and Roadmapping at Airbus where he was responsible for roadmapping a $1-billion R&D portfolio. His passion is to improve life on our home planet Earth through research and education, while paving the way for humanity’s future off-world settlements.