Dr. Khaldi completed his BS and MS degrees at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and his PhD at the Penn State University (PSU) in 1995. As a student, Dr. Khaldi was awarded the Gibran Khalil Gibran Medal of Honor for best achievement in undergraduate studies, earned the Hariri Foundation Award, inducted into the Phi Theta Kappa National Honor Fraternity, and made the USA National Dean’s list. He was a Teaching Assistant (1988) and a Research Assistant (1989) at SUNY and a Lecturer (1989-1991), and an Instructor (1991-1995) at PSU.
Dr. Khaldi acted as the Northern Regional Coordinator with Dar Al-Handasah (Shair and Partners) Consultants in Lebanon (1995-1997) for the national Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) project that includes installations, replacement, and/or rehabilitation of the existing network. The PSTN also includes the provision of Fiber Optic links, Digital Microwave, enhancement of international communications, rehabilitation of existing buildings, construction of new buildings, and training of the Ministry of Post and Telephone (MPT) staff. The project is supervised by Dar Al-Handasah in association with Norconsult International and implemented by three international contractors Alcatel, Ericsson, and Siemens.
Dr. Khaldi was an Assistant Professor at the Notre Dame University (NDU) (1997-1998) where he assisted in establishing the Electrical Engineering Department (EED) and its laboratories. In 1998, he joined the University of Balamand (UOB) on a full-time basis as an Assistant Professor and in 2006 as an Associate Professor. In 2018, Dr. Khaldi was appointed as the EED Chairperson.
Dr. Khaldi tenure in academia – that spans more than thirty years in four universities two in the USA (SUNY and PSU) and two in Lebanon (NDU and UOB) – is primarily based upon the three major pillars of the profession namely teaching, research, and service.
Dr. Khaldi has taught more than twenty different subjects and has made a great impression. One of his courses at PSU was identified with high gains in student scores on one or more criteria measured by the Academic Profile. He also has made the highest Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness scores which are significantly above not only the Electrical Engineering Department but the College of Engineering average scores. He received highly encouraging praises and commendations from colleagues, and gratitude and appreciation from students.
Dr. Khaldi has an ongoing research in renewable energy, power and control systems, and engineering education where he has numerous publications in these areas. The use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to assist power system dispatchers in the decision making of switching various controllers scattered all over the network to maintaining voltage stability was proven to be effective. Dr. Khaldi also worked on designing Model Predictive Control (MPC) and optimal PID controller of a scaled-model helicopter (a highly nonlinear, coupled, and unstable machine) where the performance was greatly improved. He also worked on Event-Driven controllers for Autonomous Vehicles.
During his tenure at UOB, Dr. Khaldi has served on eight university-wide committees including being the Secretary of UOB Senate, seven faculty-wide committees including being the coordinator of the Engineering Projects and Theses Committee and a special Assistant to the Dean on Design for the ABET Steering Committee, and four departmental-wide committees.
Dr. Khaldi is a Student Member (1992), a Member (1995), and a Senior Member (2009) of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Order of the Engineer (USA) since 1987 and a member of the Order of Engineers and Architects – North Lebanon since 1993. He is also a member of several Scientific Committees of International Technical Conferences and reviewer of several conference proceedings and journals.
Power Systems:
New concepts to modeling and control led to optimal planning and operation of power systems. Electric Utility power dispatcher makes a sequence of decisions to control a faulted power system. This is done by trial and error which is primarily based on the dispatcher experience. Wrong switching may worsen the problem and that may lead to blackout. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were designed to assist the dispatcher in the decision making. Fast PCs and efficient programming lead to an automatic control paradigm that helps with the decision making process. A vectorized approach to modeling power systems that has been derived and proved utilizes vector processing speed up the processing time which leads to faster decision making. Computer software, the Power System Analysis Toolbox (PSAT), is written, tested, and put to use. With the PSAT one would have a better insight about the operation and components failure of a power system.
Control Systems:
Dynamical systems modeling requires the understanding of the system’s nature and the use of the appropriate governing empirical laws to derive a mathematical model whose solution will lead to the acquaintance of the system’s behavior. The control system, whether a dynamical or switching control, is not to stabilize an unstable system but also to improve the performance given a set of constraints. A three dimensional helicopter visualization model was created and implemented in Matlab and Simulink. This model will be used to visualize a scaled model helicopter in order to assess the helicopter’s attitude during different fly modes. In addition, Autonomous Vehicle (AV) is a self-driven vehicle that is capable of negotiating its way not only on highways but also in cities. AV is a dynamical system that undergoes a sequence of events that occur at particular instances of time where it has to adapt itself to the new environments. Consequently, AV is a Discrete-Event Control System (DECS) that includes Cruise Control (CC), Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), and Event-Driven ACC (EDACC). Stateflow of Simulink was used to simulate the DECS.
Research Interests
- Renewable and Efficient Use of Energy
- Power Systems: Modeling and Control
- Control Systems and Automation
- Engineering Education
Selected Works
- Khaldi, M. R., A. K. Sarkar, K. Y. Lee, and Y. M. Park, “The Modal Performance Measure for Parameter Optimization of Power System Stabilizers,” IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 660-666, December 1993.
- Khaldi, M. R., “Sensitivity Matrices for Reactive Power Dispatch and Voltage Control of Large-Scale Power Systems,” WSEAS Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Issue 9, Volume 3, pp. 1918-1923, November 2004.
- Jreijiry J. and Khaldi M., “An Event-Driven Adaptive Cruise Controller,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Trends in Applied Knowledge-Based Systems and Data Science, Volume 9799, pp. 983-994, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, July 2016
- Khaldi M. R., “An Intelligent Cognitive Expert System for Voltage Control in Power Systems,” 2003 IEEE Conference on Control Applications (CCA 2003), June 23-25, 2003, Istanbul, Turkey, pp. 319-324.
- Khaldi, M. R., Abiad (EL), H., Chamchoum, S., and Abdul Ahad, E., “Plant Identification and Predictive Control of a Scaled-Model Helicopter,” IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE 2009), July 5-8, 2009, Seoul, Korea, Paper ID: SD-006254, pp. 1720-1725.