RESILIENCE ENGINEERING LABORATORY
Major accidents and failures with high consequence are often hard to recover from, and the recovery is usually an afterthought, reactive in nature, and unanticipated by system designers. Over the past few years the idea of making engineered systems resilient to failures, with built-in ability to recover, has gained some momentum. While the extent to which “resilience engineering” can be realized is not known, the appeal of the idea, enormous implications, and the vast research horizon are not difficult to imagine. The Garrick Institute seeks research opportunities to introduce resilience through new design paradigms and full integration of advances in relevant disciplines such as materials science, robotics, electrical engineering and computer science, and human factors.
+ Disaster Resilience of Sea Ports
Shipping ports serve as a hub for critical lifeline infrastructure, supporting the storage and transport of various types of cargoes over water. Their prominence as major centers of commerce is such that any prolonged disruption in functionality have far reaching consequences that extend beyond their site of central operations. Past experience have highlighted the vulnerability of ports to severe hazard-induced damage leading to loss of operations and billions of dollars in direct and indirect economic losses. Previous research on the disaster risk assessment of port facilities has been largely focused on developing methods to assess the immediate probable impacts in terms of casualties and economic losses at a single site of interest. However, these existing approaches to not account for the spatial and temporal dynamics of service disruption, which can amplify the expected losses. With this limitation in mind, the proposed research will focus on developing strategies to quantify and enhance the disaster resilience of shipping ports. Resilience in the context of this research refers to the ability of a port facility to absorb the hazard-induced shock (robustness), minimize the propagation of consequences beyond the site of primary impact (loose coupling) and recover in a timely manner (rapidity). The intent of the authors is for the broad dissemination of the results of this research to various academic and industry circles. By forecasting trajectories of recovery for various hazard-induced scenarios, the tools developed will enable decision-makers to take steps towards enhancing the resilience of shipping ports. By allowing a side-by-side comparison of the long term cumulative impacts and cost-benefits, the models will reinforce the notion that resilience-building can be an investment rather than an expense.
Disaster Resilience of Sea Ports
Shipping ports serve as a hub for critical lifeline infrastructure, supporting the storage and transport of various types of cargoes over water. Their prominence as major centers of commerce is such that any prolonged disruption in functionality have far reaching consequences that extend beyond their site of central operations. Past experience has highlighted the vulnerability of ports to severe hazard-induced damage leading to loss of operations and billions of dollars in direct and indirect economic losses. Previous research on the disaster risk assessment of port facilities has been largely focused on developing methods to assess the immediate probable impacts in terms of casualties and economic losses at a single site of interest. However, these existing approaches do not account for the spatial and temporal dynamics of service disruption, which can amplify the expected losses. With this limitation in mind, the proposed research will focus on developing strategies to quantify and enhance the disaster resilience of shipping ports. Resilience in the context of this research refers to the ability of a port facility to absorb the hazard-induced shock (robustness), minimize the propagation of consequences beyond the site of primary impact (loose coupling) and recover in a timely manner (rapidity). The intent is the broad dissemination of the results of this research to various academic and industry circles. By forecasting trajectories of recovery for various hazard-induced scenarios, tools can be developed to enable decision-makers to take steps towards enhancing the resilience of shipping ports. By allowing a side-by-side comparison of the long term cumulative impacts and cost-benefits, the models will reinforce the notion that resilience-building can be an investment rather than an expense.
