Decision Support for Resilient Infrastructure
We develop mathematical and computational tools to support decision-making in real-world problems characterized by high complexity and uncertainty. Our work focuses on the built environment and on how human actors interact with and shape it.
To this end, our mission is to integrate the physical, social and informational domains, thereby supporting the development of a resilient and adaptive built environment for the future.
The challenges we work on
Climate Change Adaptation
System Complexity & Interdependencies
Digital Transformation & Innovation
Infrastructure Resilience & Renewal
Uncertain Future Demand
Infrastructure decisions are long-lived, expensive and hard to reverse, and they are increasingly made under conditions the original designs never anticipated. Five pressures dominate, and none of them arrives alone. They compound one another, which is why we do not treat them separately.
Climate Change Adaptation. Hazards are shifting faster than the standards written to withstand them: wildfires reaching regions with no history of them, wind and water extremes beyond the design envelope. Adaptation cannot wait for complete evidence, which makes it as much a problem of uncertainty as of hazard. We work on the hazard through Wildfires & Wildland–Urban Interfaces, and on the decision through Resilience Engineering.
System Complexity & Interdependencies. Infrastructure rarely fails one system at a time. A power outage becomes a transport failure, which becomes a delayed emergency response — and every other pressure on this list travels along the same couplings. Resilience Engineering is how we trace those cascades and identify where a network is genuinely vulnerable rather than merely exposed.
Digital Transformation & Innovation. Sensors, monitoring networks and digital twins now generate far more data than decision-makers can act on, and more data is not the same as less doubt. Uncertainty Quantification & Management turns that stream into evidence a decision can rest on, together with an honest account of how far to trust it.
Infrastructure Resilience & Renewal. Much of Europe's built stock is approaching the end of its design life while maintenance budgets tighten and climate loads rise. What to repair, when, and on what evidence is a question Resilience Engineering and Uncertainty Quantification & Management answer together: one establishes what the system must withstand, the other what we actually know about its condition.
Uncertain Future Demand. Investments made today must serve a future nobody can forecast reliably; a future shaped by all four pressures above. The aim is not a better forecast but choices that remain defensible across a wide range of plausible futures, which is where Resilience Engineering and Uncertainty Quantification & Management meet.
Taken separately, these are five problems. Taken together they are one: how to decide well about systems that will outlive the assumptions they were designed on.
