Engineering Systems Group

The Engineering Systems Group (ESG) is committed to serving UMTRI and the University of Michigan by providing leadership for research that addresses engineering systems and human-machine interactions, primarily in the ground vehicle/driver-interaction domain and by serving as a collaborative research partner with other groups based on its world-class capabilities in data-architecture and data-analysis techniques.

ESG's research is geared primarily toward 1) generating and using new knowledge regarding the dynamics of the driving process and 2) the conception and fabrication of novel engineering measurement and control systems.

The multidisciplinary aspect of ESG's research allows for complementary and supportive collaboration with other UMTRI groups, researchers at other U-M departments, and colleagues worldwide. The ability to measure and analyze new types of data enables new experimental approaches and solutions, whether they are applied to engineering, human factors, behavior, energy, or other research areas. The naturalistic (or field operational test) data systems that UMTRI pioneered in the middle 1990s, and continue to use, are prime examples of these research endeavors.

As UMTRI expands its strategic vision to encompass safety, sustainability, and mobility, ESG is poised to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of the driving process and to demonstrate the applicability of those dynamics in all three strategic directions:

Safety –design and evaluate driving assistance systems
Safety – develop and apply surrogate measures of driving safety to enable smaller and more viable tests of technology impacts and basic crash risks of populations
Mobility – assess safe driving performance of young, aging, or impaired drivers
Safety & Mobility – develop experimental methods to assess connected vehicle system applications
Mobility – develop experimental platforms for use in creating and testing (semi)autonomous vehicle systems
Sustainability – use UMTRI naturalistic driving data and our existing expertise to design and evaluate hybrid powertrain systems for highway vehicles

An overarching theme for these research directions is the application of system-dynamics theory, experiments, models, and simulations to study ground vehicles and the interaction of vehicles with drivers, roadways, and the driving environment including cooperative vehicle-highway systems.

Recent sponsors and research partners have included the U.S. Department of Transportations's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Federal Highway Administration, Research and Innovative Technology Administration as well as the Transportation Research Board, the U.S. Army, and industry partners Visteon, Eaton, Honda, and Physical Sciences, Inc.