Climate resilience of interdependent transport and energy infrastructure informed by emerging digital technologies

The performance of transport and energy infrastructure is continuously challenged by multiple natural hazards, exacerbated by climate change. The frequency and intensity of disasters including flash floods, landslides, hurricanes or bushfires are increased, causing environmental, economic and societal impacts, in particular due to failures of ageing and over-utilised transport and power networks.

Currently, there is an urgent need for integrated toolkits to quantify the resilience of infrastructure and their interdependencies to climate change. More importantly, a vast of monitoring data and evidence, which is being made available daily to infrastructure owners remains unexploited. This includes terrestrial, e.g. data generated by cameras and mobile activity, and airborne data, e.g. InSAR, hyperspectral imaging, aerial photography etc.

This wealth of information provides reliable means for producing accurate and rapidly informed resilience assessments. This research aims at developing an integrated framework inclusive of lifecycle metrics (e.g. cost- and/or environment-based), for the monitoring-based quantification of resilience for transport and energy assets exposed to multiple natural hazards and climate change effects.

The framework will embrace: (i) the robustness of the assets (e.g. bridges, embankments, tunnels, electric power substations) to hazard actions based on new functionality and vulnerability models considering interdependencies, (ii) the rapidity of the recovery, based on expert elicitation and practical reinstatement and restoration models, (iii) the monitoring data related to the performance and capacity of the assets, to better inform the above models.

The new models will be encapsulated in a toolkit, which will be demonstrated through selected case studies in the UK using GIS tools.

This project is in support of all infrastructure management stages, i.e. prior, during and after multiple, cumulative and/or abrupt natural hazards (see Argyroudis et al., 2020; Achillopoulou et al., 2020), accounting for potential exacerbations of natural stressors due to adverse climatic deviations.

The research also contributes to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for delivering climate-resilient infrastructure (SDG9) and sustainable industrialization, making the world safer from multiple hazards (SDG11), whilst adapting quickly and efficiently to the planet’s changing climate (SDG13).

Candidates for this project will likely have a background in civil and environmental engineering and/or surveying engineering and/or electrical engineering. Familiarity with climate change models and/or network modelling will be an advantage. Yet, adjustments can be made to tailor the project to students’ needs and interests. The lead supervisor will be Dr Sotirios Argyroudis, more information:

Geotechnical and Environmental Engineering