Achievement

IGERT Trainee Miles Detrixhe developed the Fast Sweeping Method (FSM) for the solution of hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). The FSM takes advantage of a causality principle for hyperbolic PDEs to decouple a large system of equations into a sequence of single equations. This work transformed the method from an entirely sequential algorithm into a highly parallel one, and was published in J. Computational Physics. Miles’ work has spawned some unexpected and exciting new research directions. He recently gave a talk at the SIAM Computational Science and Engineering conference highlighting how his work can augment existing robotic path planning technology to solve a complex real world problem. He is currently working to generalize his method to be able to solve a wide range of optimal control problems.