Shabbir Ahmed

R K B M Rizmi, Shabbir Ahmed

Structural damage detection using non-contact sensing remains a challenging problem in structural health monitoring. This study presents a data-driven framework based on Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) for extracting structural dynamics directly from high-speed video recordings of vibrating structures. Within this approach, the underlying dynamics are approximated by a linear operator, whose spectral decomposition yields modal frequencies and corresponding spatial mode shapes, enabling a physically interpretable representation of the system response. The proposed methodology is evaluated through both numerical and experimental investigations. First, a cantilever beam model is simulated in ANSYS under healthy and damaged conditions. DMD is applied to partial observation data to reconstruct and predict the system response, while the extracted modal features are analyzed to characterize damage-induced variations. Second, high-speed video recordings of the beam are processed into spatiotemporal snapshot matrices, allowing DMD to recover full-field dynamic behavior without contact sensors. To enable quantitative assessment, a damage index is formulated based on DMD-derived modal features, capturing deviations in both frequency content and spatial characteristics. The results demonstrate consistent and distinguishable patterns between healthy and damaged states across both simulation and experiments, highlighting the capability of DMD as a robust and interpretable tool for non-contact damage detection using video data.

Khalid Mahmud Labib, Inayat Rasool, Shabbir Ahmed

Lithium-ion batteries exhibit nonlinear voltage dynamics across varying operating conditions and aging states, making accurate modeling essential for estimation, control, and health monitoring. This work compares two data-driven frameworks for modeling voltage responses from hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC) measurements: an operator-theoretic model based on Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control (DMDc), and a physics-guided transformer-based sequence model. In the DMDc framework, delay-embedded snapshots of terminal voltage and current are used to identify system matrices directly from measurement data, yielding an interpretable state-space model for recursive prediction. In parallel, a modified PatchTST architecture is developed in which terminal voltage is decomposed into an analytically computed open-circuit-voltage (OCV) component and a learned dynamic residual, with a future-current fusion pathway tailored to the prescribed HPPC current profile. Experimental results on a 30 Ah lithium-ion cell show that, although both models capture the sharp transient pulse dynamics, DMDc achieves lower prediction error and greater robustness to cell degradation under the present limited data regime, while the transformer captures qualitatively similar dynamics with greater architectural flexibility. These results highlight the advantages of operator-theoretic models in interpretability, computational efficiency, and robustness, while indicating the promise of physics-guided transformer models when larger and more diverse datasets are available.

Khalid Mahmud Labib, Saad Waheed, Bakhtiar Nafis et al.

Accurate monitoring of lithium-ion battery (LIB) degradation is essential, yet it remains challenging due to the complex, nonlinear, and time-varying nature of electrochemical aging processes. Conventional equivalent circuit models (ECMs) provide simplified representations of battery behavior using fixed electrical components, but they cannot capture evolving internal degradation mechanisms and structural changes over time. In this study, a data-driven framework is developed by integrating dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc) with graph-theoretic analysis to characterize battery degradation from operational data alone. The mode matrix ($\mathbfϕ$) obtained from DMDc is transformed into a weighted adjacency matrix, enabling the representation of battery dynamics as an evolving network of interacting states. Graph-based measures, including connectivity and a modularity (proxy), are then used to quantify structural changes in the system across degradation stages. The results show a clear transition from a highly connected and coherent network in the healthy state to a progressively weaker and more fragmented structure as degradation advances, accompanied by increasing heterogeneity. This work demonstrates that graph-theoretic representations can effectively capture the evolving dynamics of battery degradation and provide interpretable insights into system-level aging behavior.

Shabbir Ahmed, Marcio Juliato, Christopher Gutierrez et al.

Automotive systems continuously increase their dependency on Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and become more interconnected to improve safety, comfort and Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) functions to passengers and drivers. As a consequence of that trend, there is an expanding attack surface which may potentially expose vehicle's critical functions to cyberattacks. It is possible for an adversary to reach the underlying Control Area Network (CAN) through a compromised node or external-facing network interface, and launch masquerading attacks that can compromise road and passenger safety. Due to lack of native authentication in the CAN protocol, an approach to detect masquerading attacks is to use ECU voltage fingerprinting schemes to verify that the messages are sent by authentic ECUs. Though effective against simple masquerading attacks, prior work is unable to detect attackers such as hardware Trojans, which can mimic ECU voltages in addition to spoofing messages. We introduce a novel Two-point ECU Fingerprinting scheme and demonstrate efficacy in a controlled lab setting and on a moving vehicle. Our results show that our proposed two-point fingerprinting scheme is capable of an overall F1-score over 99.4%. The proposed approach raises the bar for attackers trying to compromise automotive security both remotely and physically, therefore improving security and safety of autonomous vehicles.

Alinson S. Xavier, Feng Qiu, Shabbir Ahmed

Security-Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) is a fundamental problem in power systems and electricity markets. In practical settings, SCUC is repeatedly solved via Mixed-Integer Linear Programming, sometimes multiple times per day, with only minor changes in input data. In this work, we propose a number of machine learning (ML) techniques to effectively extract information from previously solved instances in order to significantly improve the computational performance of MIP solvers when solving similar instances in the future. Based on statistical data, we predict redundant constraints in the formulation, good initial feasible solutions and affine subspaces where the optimal solution is likely to lie, leading to significant reduction in problem size. Computational results on a diverse set of realistic and large-scale instances show that, using the proposed techniques, SCUC can be solved on average 4.3x faster with optimality guarantees, and 10.2x faster without optimality guarantees, but with no observed reduction in solution quality. Out-of-distribution experiments provides evidence that the method is somewhat robust against dataset shift.