Annually, the Safety Engineering, Risk and Reliability Analysis Division (SERAD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) hosts a challenge to undergraduate and graduate students to submit papers on Safety Engineering, Risk and Reliability Analysis topics, including papers already submitted to the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE). The papers are peer-reviewed by experts in these areas. The top winning papers in each of the undergraduate and graduate groups were presented in a special SERAD session at the ASME IMECE 2021 and honored at a SERAD awards banquet during the conference. Recognitions also included plaques and cash honorariums for the winning student authors sponsored by FM Global.
The PRA Group had four papers entering the graduate student 2021 SERAD Student Safety Innovation Challenge. All four were recognized as follows:
- 4th Place Graduate Student Winner: Priyanka Pandit, Alp Tezbasaran, and Arjun Earthperson advised by Mihai A. Diaconeasa for the paper titled “Evaluating the Implementation of Distributed Ledger Technology for the Licensing and Regulation of Nuclear Power Plants“.
- Honorable Mention Award: Arjun Earthperson advised by Mihai A. Diaconeasa for the paper titled “Verification Study of the Nuclear PRA for the Mars 2020 Mission Following Accidental Orbital Re-Entry“.
- Honorable Mention Award: Priyanka Pandit, Arjun Earthperson, and Alp Tezbasaran advised by Mihai A. Diaconeasa for the paper titled “A Quantitative Approach to Assess the Likelihood of Supply Chain Shortages“.
- Honorable Mention Award: Philipp Grimmeisen and Artur Karimov advised by Mihai A. Diaconeasa and Andrey Morozov for the paper titled “Demonstration of a Limited Scope Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Autonomous Warehouse Robots With OpenPRA“.