Federal Grant Award Summary

Western Michigan University received a $120,941 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), awarded August 1, 2026, with completion targeted for July 31, 2028. This collaborative research initiative develops practical curriculum and open educational tools for concurrent and distributed computing within engineering contexts, addressing the critical need for engineers to build safer, more reliable safety-critical systems used in automobiles, aircraft, and autonomous vehicles where timing or coordination errors can lead to unsafe behavior and costly failures.

The project delivers four modular learning modules covering: (1) foundations of concurrent execution including race conditions and deadlock; (2) fault tolerance in distributed systems including failure taxonomies and consensus protocols; (3) timing and synchronization in autonomous vehicle software using Robot Operating System 2 and the CARLA simulation environment; and (4) safety and security assurance in aviation systems using agent-based simulation for unmanned aerial system swarms and collision-avoidance protocols. On the tooling side, the award supports development of an extended concurrency visualization system with instrumentation libraries for POSIX Threads, FreeRTOS, and Robot Operating System 2, as well as a concurrent event description language for instructor-created demonstrations, with outcomes evaluated through established evaluation methodologies.