Dr. Sha was recently invited to participate in the Annual Summer Forum held by The Cooperative Mobility for Competitive Megaregions (CM²) consortium at UT Austin. The multidisciplinary view fostered by the center was fascinating, and it was exciting to see how researchers from different fields integrate theories to tackle some of the most challenging problems in complex urban systems and future smart cities and mobility.

SiDi Lab received funding from the Department of Transportation (DOT) through the CM² center to investigate the complex urban system and its expansion in the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Austin-Houston, one of the fastest-growing megaregions in the United States. In particular, the objective is to develop a complex network-based analysis framework in support of the investigation of the co-evolution of cross-system interactions (e.g., urban networks and transportation networks) in the Texas Triangle megaregion.

This semester (Spring 2023), I picked the course project topic of Drone Delivery System Design for ME 366J: Design Methodology. It is a challenging topic, and students did a fantastic job practicing the concepts and methods they learned from the classroom on Design Methodology, such as customer needs analysis, function modeling and decomposition, mind-mapping and 6-3-5 methods for brainstorming and ideation, design of experiments, design for X, etc. Enjoy a few videos shot during the project demonstration day below.