ENGINEERING TO ENHANCE THE RESILIENCE OF THE BUILT AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS
Engineering choices associated with evolving landforms (e.g., the natural environment) and critical civil infrastructure (CCI) systems (i.e., the built environment) play a key role in supporting the DHS mission to protect and improve disaster preparedness in coastal regions vulnerable to natural disasters. CCI systems should be designed to proactively address ways to minimize exposure of communities, to protect lifelines necessary during and after disaster events, and to enable rapid response and recovery. Thus, a major goal is to investigate innovative and proactive approaches to plan, design and construct CCI components to provide the necessary services needed to increase the disaster preparedness and resilience of the integrated CCI system, as well as to protect the natural environment. To achieve this goal, five highly interrelated research projects at NCSU are proposed to meet the overarching objective to enhance the resilience of the built and natural environments. In addition, two complementary projects at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cal Poly San Louis Obispo are proposed.
The research projects aim at the development of value innovations to enhance the resilience of the built and natural environments. The three areas of i) landforms and built infrastructure interactions, ii) system observability, diagnostics, and prognostics, iii) innovative component design approaches, upgrades, 
and repair/retrofits, are integrated under the crosscutting areas of iv) civil infrastructure systems modeling, and v) a cyberinfrastructure for visualization, infrastructure health monitoring, data analysis, and decision support. Specifically, the project on landform changes will investigate modeling and data analysis procedures to estimate future landforms in consideration of interdependencies between the built and natural environments when subjected to natural disaster events. The project on observability will focus on identifying the types of information to be sensed for diagnostic and prognostic analyses, and for condition assessment of the CCI system as well as the natural system. The CCI component design project will study updated failure modes and innovative design methods in consideration of new coastal-centric design conditions reflective of disaster events specific to coastal regions. The integrated systems modeling project will assimilate the three projects above to model, analyze, and ultimately improve disaster protection performance and resilience of the CCI system as a whole. The systems model will be implemented in a high performance computational framework as a part of the cyberinfrastructure project that will incorporate a variety of techniques including mathematical and numerical algorithms, probabilistic analysis, forecasting, sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, and optimization. The cyberinfrastructure project will provide a computationally tractable implementation by coupling high-performance computing technologies and modern software engineering approaches. The collective contribution of the research projects will provide engineering support for decision making to enhance the resilience of the built and natural environments.
Research Projects
- Evolving and Engineered Landforms
- System Observability, Diagnosis, and Prognosis
- Innovative Component Design and Retrofit of Critical Civil Infrastructure
- Integrated Systems Modeling of Civil Infrastructure and the Environment
- Cyberinfrastructure
For more information about the Project, contact Dr. Margery Overton.
©Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
