Our News

Our paper Bridge-specific flood risk assessment of transport networks using GIS and remotely sensed data is published in the Science of the Total Environment (IF=10.75)

Few words: The paper delivers a unique framework for the expedient assessment of flood risk to transportation networks focused on the response of the most critical and vulnerable infrastructure assets, the bridges.

Stergios Mitoulis was interviewed by BBC World News for the impact of heatwave and extreme temperature to critical infrastructure

Our BBC interviews on climate resilience of critical infrastructure and sustainable development

BBC interviewed us today twice, one on the BBCNews and one on the BBC World News, see one of the videos here.

The climate crisis and its impact on critical infrastructure were at the epicentre of these interviews, due to the ongoing heatwave and wildfires that cause devastation in Europe. We reiterated the positions of our agenda-setting research publications and projects on climate change and what is of paramount importance in climate adaptation i.e.,:

– Building resilience does not mean abandoning efficiency, but rather maximising the long-term sustainability of socio-economic systems in the face of future disruptions. It is better to do this with ex-ante adaptation rather than post-ante reactive system recovery.

– We urgently need synergies between scientists, infrastructure operators and governments, to overcome siloed thinking which leads to cascading ramifications. This includes embracing system complexity to minimise consequences to interdependent systems from unexpected disruption.

– We need new policies that underpin climate change and design for uncertainty in view of different scenarios of climate change.

– We need more research to build adaptive capacity that incorporates deep uncertainties associated with climate change underpinned by digital technologies.

Building resilience in our critical infrastructure through emerging technology is a vital strand of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as it contributes to climate-resilient infrastructure (SDG 9) and sustainable industrialisation.

We will deliver a very special Workshop to Ukrainian Engineers on the:

“Design of prestressed bridges to Eurocodes – Resilient ways to build back better”

This is an initiative of the www.bridgeUkraine.org in collaboration with the Ukrainian State Road Research Institute (see post in Ukrainian here: https://lnkd.in/eDeRKJSv)

Anyone is welcome to attend this Workshop as you might be able to ask, answer questions and interact with Engineers who will reconstruct Ukraine. With this Workshop we aim to create a Community of Practitioners to continuously help the engineers working in Ukraine to assess, design and reconstruct damaged bridges and infrastructure assets in a resilient and sustainable way.

When:
7:00 am to 1:30 pm UK time, Saturday 6 August 2022, online seminar.

Register here:
https://lnkd.in/eUGHXrcm

The seminar will be delivered in English and will be translated in Ukrainian by Marat KHODZHAIEV, Bridge Engineer & expert on post-tensioned bridges and bridge optimization

The workshop will include three parts:
Part 1: Design of post-tensioned bridges according to Eurocodes
Part 2: Resilience in bridge and transport network design, assessment and reconstruction
Part 2: Answering questions and revising design decisions at the request of seminar participants

You can ask the questions you are most interested in on the topic of post-tensioned bridges and also send a drawing for revision. We are currently preparing the material for the seminar in order to best adapt it to the needs of Ukrainian engineers. Therefore, we will be very grateful if you ask questions, please message Marat Khodzhaiev.

We look forward to seeing you on August 6.

Our project was successful, a multidisciplinary and multipartner project with 18 partners.

Title:

RISKADAPT- Asset-level modelling of risks in the face of climate-induced extreme events and adaptation

RISKADAPT will provide, in close cooperation with the end-users & stakeholders, a novel, integrated, modular, interoperable, public and free, customizable user-friendly platform, to support systemic, risk-informed decisions regarding adaptation to climate change induced compound events at the asset level, focusing on the structural system. RISKADAPT will explicitly model dependencies between infrastructures, which, inter alia, will provide a better understanding of the nexus between climate hazards and social vulnerabilities and resilience. Moreover, this project will identify gaps in data and propose ways to overcome them, and advance the state of the art of asset-level modelling through advanced climate science to predict climate change forcing on the structure of interest, structural analyses, customized to the specific structure of interest, that consider all major climate change induced load effects in tandem with material deterioration, novel probabilistic environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC) of structural adaptation measures and a new model to assess climate risk that will combine technical risk assessment with an assessment of social risks.

This is of particular interest to me as the landmark Polyfytos Bridge will be one of the main case studies of this project and we will try to identify optimised adaptation strategies leading to minimum social impacts for the local community.

Leader: RISA Germany

The project is in support of climate change adaptation, adaptation, resilience, sustainability, net-zero and digitalisation

The infrastructuResilience was awarded the 2022 European Council on Computing in Construction (EC3) Thorpe Medal, for our paper:

Argyroudis, S.A., Mitoulis, S.A., Chatzi, E., Baker, J.W., Brilakis, I., Gkoumas, K., Vousdoukas, M., Hynes, W., Carluccio, S., Keou, O., Frangopol, M.D. and Linkov, I. (2022) “Digital technologies can enhance global climate resilience of critical infrastructure,” Journal of Climate Risk Management, 35,

You can download the paper for free here.

It’s an open-access paper and accessible to general audiences and sets an agenda for data-driven resilience and sustainability assessments in critical infrastructure.

The award (https://lnkd.in/etzXTBRD) was instituted and endowed in 2018 in the honour of Prof Antony Thorpe, a pioneering professor in construction information technology and co-founder of COMIT the community for mobile #computing in construction, and it is awarded in recognition of a paper that contributes to either practical or research aspects of engineering informatics disciplines in the built environment. The practical value of contribution and its impact on engineering informatics practice are key evaluation criteria.

ReCharged – Climate-aware Resilience for Sustainable Critical and interdependent Infrastructure Systems enhanced by emerging Digital Technologies. Funder: HORIZON-MSCA-SE-2021 

New funding received from Horizon Europe:
Our €1.6m project was successful with a 97%, see details below.

Facts:
12 partners, 35 colleagues from 10 countries led mainly by women in engineering, 5 industrial partners, 6 universities and research and technology centres.

Brief description:
ReCharged has the vision to develop an integrated framework toward a practical visualisation platform in order to optimise and streamline climate resilience and whole-life carbon emission assessments for interdependent Transport and Energy Systems, Lifelines and Assets. We do that by harnessing the power of digital technologies and data to quantify the functionality and recovery of infrastructure. To achieve this, we will train people through research, innovation, and dissemination activities of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral exchanges. ReCharged will facilitate the decision-making of operators, make people feel safer and augment researchers’ skills and career perspectives.

Special thenks to Dr Sotirios Argyroudis and Igor Linkov for their input

We won a Marie-Sklowdowska Curie research project (MSCA-PF-21) which will aim to facilitate infrastructure digitalisation and data driven resilience modelling:

title: DiRect – DIgitally-enhanced REsilience of Critical Transport infrastructure

A few words for this project:

DiRect will establish a streamlined, openly available, web-based toolkit for the integrated use of emerging advanced technologies towards urgently needed recovery models and adaptation paths to incentivize civil infrastructure resilience against multiple natural hazards exacerbated by climate change. This original approach of resilience will transform current approaches and strategies for monitoring infrastructure, by integrating heterogeneous data into model updating for achieving reliable and swift assessments. Advanced numerical modelling, fragility and recovery model development, as well as in applications of Geographic Information Systems GIS, Remote Sensing and Infrastructure Monitoring, the research output of DiRect will be calibrated based on a carefully selected case study, involving the performance and recovery of representative critical infrastructure in the recently devastated Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler region of Germany, following the pivotal flooding event of July 2021. The proposed toolkit can be used by public-and-private sector stakeholders for rapid decision-making and risk-informed management of similar critical infrastructure systems exposed to multiple natural hazards.