Two fully funded PhD positions are available under the supervision of Prof. Amin Hammad at Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Research topic 1: Developing outage prediction models (OPMs) for estimating the impact of extreme weather events.
Outages caused by extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and longer because of climate change, resulting in lower quality of service and reduced customer satisfaction. OPMs are Machine Learning (ML) based models designed to predict the number of power outages for different types of weather events (e.g., temperature, wind, snow, and freezing rain). Historical weather and outage data will be used in training and testing deep learning networks, including the types of assets and trees (from GIS data) and the probability and severity of the weather. The research will also calculate direct and indirect outage costs.
Research topic 2: Comparing hardening options for power distribution networks.
Outages caused by extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and longer because of climate change, resulting in lower quality of service and reduced customer satisfaction. Several hardening options have been proposed for overhead power distribution lines (e.g., vegetation management, selective undergrounding, etc.). This research aims to compare these options by developing Lifecycle Cost-Benefit Analysis (LCCBA) models. Each option has a unique cost profile based on historical data in terms of its capital investment and operational cost impacts. In addition, the cost of outages caused by weather events will be calculated in the absence of any hardening measures considering the probability and the impact of weather events. The benefits of hardening options will be evaluated primarily in terms of their avoidance benefit (i.e., how they may help avoid direct and indirect costs).
The PhD students will be registered in the Information & Systems Engineering program or Building Engineering program.
Required Qualifications
Please apply only if you have most of the following qualifications:
(1) Degrees in engineering or computer science with GPA greater than 3.7/4 in all degrees. (2) Strong research experience
Demonstrated by at least one published journal or international conference paper (as the main author).
The research experience should be related to the abovementioned research topics.
(3) Excellent background in mathematics and analytical skills demonstrated by grades in related
courses.
(4) Programming skills and/or familiarity with related software/hardware tools.
(5) Excellent English communication skills, including technical writing (TOEFL score above 95/120 or equivalent).
(6) Leadership and ability to collaborate with the research team.
Application process
To apply, please send your application to amin hammad@concordia.ca.
Attach your documents combined in one single PDF file in the following order:
(1) Detailed CV with all degrees (with the GPA of each degree), publications (with all authors), work experience, awards, etc.
(2) All transcripts,
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