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The Biologically Inspired Design-for-Resilience (BID4R) Research Group uses a combination of design methodology, systems engineering and complex system modeling to examine biologically inspired approaches to increase systems, systems of systems and multi-agent system resilience. 

The BID4R Research Group focuses its research on three pillars:

  • Identifying and Applying Biological Inspiration: How can we improve our understanding of biological strategies to increase resilience as well as transfer these strategies to address engineering challenges?
    • Ongoing collaboration with ERAU Prescott focuses on measuring bed bug response to stimuli. Bed bugs demonstrate distributed collaboration approaches that can be used to inspire UAV and Swarm algorithms.
    • Ant colony response to invasive fungi is being modeled and simulated as an approach to minimize the damage from intruders infiltrating swarm operations (2023 ERAU Faculty Innovative Research in Science and Technology (FIRST) Program).
    • Applying ecosystem functional roles to system-of-system design has been shown to increase resilience to unexpected faults [1].
  • Design Theory: What are best practices for design-by-analogy and biologically inspired design?
    • A recent study presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers presented an approach of using functional decomposition to derive design principles to increase multi-agent system resilience through analysis of Eusocial Insects [2].
    • A review of 660 current examples of biologically inspired design provides insight into the uses, purposes and inspiration for biologically inspired design in academia, practice and public perception. Biologically Inspired Design is most often used in the physical domain, inspired by a part of nature that is commonly well-known, uses a structural strategy to solve an issue, improves an innovation's reliability and impacts the use phase. [3].
  • Resilience Engineering: How can we improve our understanding of resilience as a property of systems as well as support current resilience engineering efforts?
    • Work has focused on deriving and developing a new metric to measure resilience for connected systems (or systems of systems) [4].
[1] B. C. Watson, S. Malone, M. J. Weissburg and B. Bras, “Adding a Detrital Actor to Increase System of System Resilience: A Case Study Test of a Biologically Inspired Design Heuristic to Guide Sociotechnical Network Evolution,” J. Mech. Des., vol. 142, no. 12, pp. 1–13, 2020, doi: 10.1115/1.4048579.
[2] I. V Hernandez, B. C. Watson, M. Weissburg and B. Bras, “Learning From Insects to Increase Multi-Agent System Resilience: Functional Decomposition and Transfer to Support Biologically Inspired Design,” in Proceedings of the ASME 2020 IDETC and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, 2021, pp. 1-12.
[3] M. G. Jastrzembski, B. C. Watson, M. J. Weissburg and B. Bras, “Assessing the Sstate of Biologically Inspired Design From Three Perspectives: Academic, Public and Practitioners,” Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, vol. 18, no. 4, 2023, doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/accb31.
[4] B. C. Watson, A. Chowdhry, M. J. Weissburg and B. Bras, “A New Resilience Metric to Compare System of Systems Architecture,” IEEE Syst. J., vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 2056–2067, 2021, doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2021.3062444
Dr. Bryan Watson
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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