Dr. Azad Madni
Executive Director, Systems Architecting and Engineering Program; Director, Distributed Autonomy and Intelligent Systems (DAIS) Laboratory, Professor of Astronautical Engineering
Northrop Grumman Foundation Fred O’Green Chair in Engineering and Professor of Astronautical Engineering
University of Southern California
Dr. Azad M. Madni is a researcher, educator,
entrepreneur, and author. He is Professor of Astronautical Engineering in the
University of Southern California and the holder of the Northrop Grumman
Foundation Fred O’Green Chair in Engineering. He is the Executive Director of the
Systems Architecting and Engineering Program and the founding director of the Distributed
Autonomy and Intelligent Systems Laboratory. He also founded the Ph.D. degree
program in systems engineering within the Astronautical Engineering Department.
He is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc., a high-tech
R&D company specializing in model-based methods for architecting and engineering
intelligent human-machine systems, and intelligent autonomous systems and
systems-of-systems. He is also the Chief Systems Engineering Advisor to The
Aerospace Corporation.
His research is cross-disciplinary and use-inspired.
His specific areas of research include model-based interactive storytelling in
virtual worlds, virtual reality-enabled distributed simulation for collective
training and collaborative engineering, formal and probabilistic modeling in
engineered resilient systems, and intelligent multiagent planning and
decision-making in autonomous systems and systems-of-systems.
His research sponsors in the government include DARPA,
OSD, NSF, SERC, MDA, AFOSR, AFRL, NASA, DHS, DOE, NIST, ONR, and ARL. His research sponsors in the aerospace and
automotive industry include Boeing, General Motors, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon,
SAIC, and ORINCON. In 2016, he received a Lifetime
Achievement Award and a Visionary
Systems Engineering Leadership Award from
Boeing for his “impact on Boeing, the aerospace industry, and the nation.”
He co-founded the IEEE SMC’s award-winning Technical
Committee on Model Based Systems Engineering and has served as its chair since
its inception in 2013. He is a Past President of the Society of Design and
Process Science and former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Integrated Design
and Process Science. He is member of the governing body of IISE’s ISE Body of
Knowledge.
He is the author of Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering: Exploiting Convergence in a
Hyper-Connected World (Springer 2018) and co-author of Tradeoff Decisions in System
Design (Springer, 2016). He is currently co-editing the Handbook on
Model Based Systems Engineering with Norm Augustine. This handbook, slated
for release in early 2022, comprises 60 chapters from international leaders in
the field.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering
and a Life Fellow/Fellow of seven professional societies including IEEE, AAAS,
AIAA, and INCOSE. He is an elected member of Omega Alpha, the systems
engineering honors society. His recent awards include: 2021 INCOSE
Benefactor Award, 2021 Joint INCOSE/ASEE Outstanding Educator Award,
2020 IEEE-USA Entrepreneur Achievement Award, 2021 IEEE AESS Judith
A. Resnik Space Award, 2020 NDIA Lt. Gen Ferguson Award, 2020 IEEE SMC
Norbert Wiener Outstanding Research Award, 2019 IEEE AESS Pioneer Award,
2019 ASME CIE Leadership Award, 2019 AIAA/ASEE John Leland Atwood
Award for Excellence in Systems Engineering, 2019 Society of Modeling and
Simulation International Presidential Award, and 2019 INCOSE Founders
Award. In 2011, he received the INCOSE Pioneer Award.
He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in
Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the
AEA/ Stanford Executive Institute.
- SERC-2010-TR-006-1-Development of 3-Year Roadmap to Transform the Discipline of Systems Engineering
- SERC-2018-TR-119-Formal Methods in Resilient Systems Design using a Flexible Contract Approach
- SERC-2019-TR-013-Next Generation Adaptive Cyber Physical Human Systems
- SERC-2015-TR-106-New Project Incubator
- SERC-2018-TR-105-New Project Incubator
- SERC-2021-TR-002-WRT 1019: Adaptive Cyber-Physical-Human Systems Testbed
Lead Author
- Conference Paper - An Integrated, Modular Research Architecture for the Transformation of Systems Engineering
- Conference Paper - Critical Success Factors for Rapid, Innovative Solutions
- Poster - RT 183: Adaptive Cyber-Physical Human Systems
- Poster - RT 166: Formal Methods in Resilient Systems Design using a Flexible Contract Approach
- Poster - RT 180: Extending Flexible Contracts for Mission Assurance and Reliability Assessment
- Poster - Formal Methods in Resilient Systems Design using a Flexible Contract Approach
- Poster - Next Generation Adaptive Cyber-Physical-Human Systems
- Presentation - USC Systems Engineering Research
- Presentation - SSRR 2021 "WRT-1019 | Adaptive Cyber-Physical-Human Systems Testbed"