Faculty Directory

Yunfei Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland. He is affiliated with the Center for Risk and Reliability and is setting up the Risk and Decision Analysis Laboratory. His research is focused on risk analysis and decision analysis for complex industrial systems, for example, nuclear power plants, electric power systems. He analyzes risks to these systems from various sources, including natural component failures, human errors, and malicious cyber and physical attacks. He is particularly interested in developing dynamic methods for probabilistic risk assessment that are suitable for modeling the dynamic and complex interactions and dependencies between these different aspects. He strongly believes that risk analysis is not just to obtain a probability value, but is valuable to decision analysis, particularly for safety-critical systems. He applies risk analysis to support risk-informed decision-making to cost-effectively improve system reliability and performance through risk-informed design optimization, maintenance policy optimization, cyber attack response optimization, etc. In his research, he uses existing and develops new methods, models, and algorithms to address these risk analysis and decision analysis problems, for example, dynamic probabilistic risk assessment, game theory, Bayesian analysis, Bayesian networks, cognitive modeling and simulation, dynamic programming, Markov decision process. He is also interested in probabilistic inference problems, for example, cyber attack detection, system health monitoring, the solution to which can support decision analysis.

Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he worked at The Ohio State University as a research associate and a post-doctoral researcher. While working at The Ohio State University, he worked on several research projects funded by the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, and Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration.

He has published 23 journal articles and 18 peer-reviewed conference papers. He frequently served as reviewers for journals and conferences in reliability engineering, risk analysis, decision analysis, etc.

Education

Ph.D., Nuclear Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, 2016

B.S., Thermal Energy and Power Engineering, Shandong University, 2011

Professional Service

• Secretary, Program Committee, Nuclear Installations Safety Division, American Nuclear Society
• Chair, Communications Committee, Nuclear Installations Safety Division, American Nuclear Society
• Technical Program Committee, The Probabilistic Safety Assessment & Management conference 16 (PSAM 16)
• Technical Program Committee, 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021)
• Chair, Logistics Committee, 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021)
• Session co-Chair, Data Analysis/Artificial Intelligence – I, 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021)
• Session co-Chair, Cyber Risk, 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021)
• Session Moderator, Autonomous Systems and AI, The 66th Annual Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (RAMS® 2020)
• Session Chair, Digital Systems Modeling and Reliability-I, The 11th Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control and Human-Machine Interface Technologies (NPIC&HMIT 2019)
• Journal reviewing: Annals of Nuclear Energy; Progress in Nuclear Energy; Reliability Engineering and System Safety; International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics; IEEE Transactions on Reliability; Frontiers in Energy Research; Nuclear Engineering and Design; Nuclear Science and Engineering; Scientific Reports; PLOS One; Nuclear Technology.
• Conference reviewing: 2023 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2023); The 16^th Probabilistic Safety Assessment & Management conference (PSAM 16); 2021 International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA 2021); Annual Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (RAMS®) 2020; Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control and Human-Machine Interface Technologies (NPIC&HMIT) 2019. 

Research Areas

Risk analysis and reliability engineering

• Probabilistic risk assessment
• Dynamic probabilistic risk assessment
• Human reliability analysis
• Cybersecurity risk analysis

Decision analysis

• Maintenance policy optimization
• Cyber attack response optimization
• Nuclear emergency response

Probabilistic inference

• Fault diagnosis
• Cyber attack detection
• Health monitoring

Applications

• Nuclear power plants
• Electric power systems

Methods used and developed

• Bayesian analysis
• Bayesian networks
• Monte Carlo simulation
• Game theory
• Particle filtering
• Dynamic programming
• Markov decision process (including Partially observable Markov decision process)
• Neural networks

2023 Spring, ENRE645 Human Reliability Analysis

The full list of publications can be found on my Google Scholar profile.