Maryland Smith’s Fu Receives Federal Grant

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) recently awarded Maryland Smith professor Michael Fu a grant to continue his study of search methods for simulation-based optimization.

The area of the research is simulation optimization and Markov decision processes, which can be used to analyze sequential (dynamic) decision making under risk and uncertainty, according to Fu, the Smith Chair of Management Science in the decision, operations and information technologies department at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Results from previous projects supported by AFOSR and the National Science Foundation (NSF) were the basis for the ideas behind the Monte Carlo tree search.

The grant, Fu says, provides an opportunity to carry on with the collaborative research that has spanned two decades and that has been conducted with longtime UMD colleague Steve Marcus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as the Institute for Systems Research in the A. James Clark School of Engineering, where Fu has a joint appointment.

“The research has been sponsored by numerous grants from AFOSR and NSF over the years, and has supported many PhD student dissertations and resulted in scores of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, as well as a research monograph,” says Fu.