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Applying principles from systems engineering to real-world sociotechnical systems that support our civilization to make them more resilient against both global and targeted disruptions.
Our infrastructure and engineered systems that are the thread of our civilization combine traditional physical resources with cyber-technologies like sensor-actuator networks and decision-making algorithms.
As disruptions to these systems caused by natural disasters, security attacks or pandemics become more frequent and diverse, a proactive approach to protecting, monitoring and controlling these systems becomes all the more important.
Resilient systems safeguard society through the preservation of resources and maintaining clean energy, air, water and supply chains. Resilient systems are able to resist environmental stresses due to climate change, natural disasters or disease outbreaks that impact the health and well-being of society. The design of resilient systems requires an understanding of fundamental system properties, their interactions with human decision-makers, and the ability to model and predict the key uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. Our research in this domain is in the design and management of societal-scale infrastructure systems for the future.
Key areas include:
Developing new analytics and control methods to ensure that our infrastructure systems and services are efficient, robust and resilient against extreme events or adversarial failures. ”