ProfessorDouglas Creighton

Doug Creighton is a Professor of Systems Engineering and the Director of Deakin University’s Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI), where he leads a team of 100 researchers at the forefront of innovation and technology in defence, transport, med tech and advanced manufacturing.

Professor Creighton’s career has focused on developing methods and algorithms to model complex systems, leading translational research in systems thinking, AI, and agent-based modelling and using these research outcomes to create novel and innovative technologies supporting solutions for real-world problems. His team of Autonomous Systems researchers successfully delivered an Australian Army (RICO) directly funded ‘Leader-Follower with Obstacle Avoidance’ project in 2023, using IISRI designed autonomy packs.

He is an internationally recognised voice in modelling and simulation research to support decision making in complex engineered systems and leads its Modelling and Simulation research program which has three core pillars, with each pillar supporting the design and development of new algorithms to address often messy, intractable problems in our communities and industrial engineered systems.

Pillar 1) Systems thinking and quantitative analytics: Extension of systems thinking methodologies through new metrics, analytics, automation and visualisation.
Pillar 2) Computational intelligence and learning algorithms: New methods for rapid uncertainty quantification and reduction in computational complexity to obtain non-dominated solutions for many-objective optimisation problems.
Pillar 3) Agent-based modelling and simulation: hierarchical agent-based multi-modal data fusion and analytics frameworks using discrete event simulation, machine learning, statistical and other complementary models for status prediction in dynamic, big data environments.

Creighton has developed algorithms for trust estimation to reflect a learning agent’s confidence in its impact estimation or prediction.