UI-ASSIST Team Member Visits Burns & McDonnell Headquarters

Burns & McDonnell is an employee-owned engineering consulting company based in Kansas City, Missouri that focuses on designing and improving our nation’s critical infrastructure.

Recently, UI-ASSIST team member Dr. Ahmed Saber visited the Burns & McDonnell headquarters to give a presentation on cybersecurity and joined fellow UI-ASSIST team member Francisco Neto for a tour of the Burns & McDonnell office and Networks, Integration and Automation (NIA) lab.

“We went around and met some folks in our department, including our director, Meghan Calabro. We went upstairs and took a tour of our NIA lab and [Dr. Saber] got to see some of the devices we have in there and came up with ideas for ETAP devices and solutions that we could try to integrate with our lab,” Neto said.

Dr. Saber is the VP of Optimization and AI at ETAP and focuses mainly on DSO Functions/Energy Management, which is the sixth theme of the UI-ASSIST project. The UI-ASSIST themes webpage details theme six as “The objectives of the task are load profiling and forecasting, system reconfiguration and state estimation, optimal operation of DERs, and demand side management.”

“ETAP is a power systems simulation software, and we are working in the power industry… I mainly work on the machine learning and optimization area. ETAP is popular in the power industry, right now we go from intelligent design to optimum operations… not all but most of the life cycle of power system applications,” Dr. Saber said.   

Neto works at Burns & McDonnell and focuses on Cybersecurity and Lab Testing/Validation, which are the fifth and eighth themes of UI-ASSIST. Cybersecurity focuses mainly on protecting assets against cyber-attacks, and lab testing and validation is centered around ensuring that various testbeds work in a laboratory setting before being used in real-world applications.

“I have been [at Burns & McDonnell] for ten years, half of my career was in utility telecommunications... I was in the department called NIA, which stands for Networks, Integration and Automation, and for the second half of my career I started going into the distribution side of things,” Neto said.