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| Naiyu Wang |
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of
Standards and Technology announced February 19 that it has awarded a $20M cooperative
agreement extending over five years to Colorado State University to establish
the Community Resilience Center of Excellence. The centers’ multi-disciplinary
team includes experts from 10 universities in the fields of engineering,
economics and social sciences and data and computing.
Co-directed by Professors John W. van de
Lindt and Bruce
Ellingwood in CSU’s Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, the team includes OU
College of Engineering faculty members Asst.
Professor Naiyu Wang and Assoc. Professor Amy Cerato of CEES and Asst.
Professor Charles Nicholson of Industrial and Systems Engineering. All will play key roles in the centers’
research program.
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| Amy Cerato |
The new center will collaborate closely with NIST to achieve
its long-term goal of developing science-based tools and guidelines that
individual communities can use to assess their resilience. This includes evaluating the effectiveness of
alternative measures intended to improve performance, minimize post-disaster
disruption and recovery time and target public and private investments in
resilience enhancement. The centerpiece
of the centers’ effort will be NIST-CORE—the NIST-Community Resilience
Modeling Environment. NIST-CORE will provide the measurement
technology for developing resilience metrics and decision tools to enhance the
resilience of the built environment. In
addition to physics-based models of civil infrastructure systems, it will
integrate models of social and economic systems that are vital to the functionality
and recovery of communities such as health care delivery, education, social
services, financial institutions and others and allow the synergies between
essential systems to be examined rationally and quantitatively. Built on an open-source platform, NIST-CORE,
with its associated software, databases and transparent user-interfaces, will
incorporate a risk-based approach to decision-making that will enable
quantitative comparisons of different resilience strategies. As NIST-CORE is
developed, its performance will be tested against data gathered from past
disasters. Ultimately, NIST-CORE will be
able to learn from one analysis to the next; a capability that does not exist
in any other risk or disaster resilience model in the world.
Wang will be responsible for research tasks related to:
·
developing resilience metrics for buildings
·
inventorying buildings and highway systems
·
examining the impact of climate change on natural
hazard modeling
·
analyzing uncertainties in the underlying
risk-informed decision framework
·
optimizing investments for risk mitigation and
community recovery for building inventories and transportation infrastructure
networks.
Nicholson will conduct research tasks related to:
·
stochastic network analysis
·
modeling interdependencies between infrastructure
systems
·
developing novel and efficient meta-heuristic
optimization algorithms that support the decision framework by permitting
efficient and intelligent searches for solutions in complex decision spaces that
involve hundreds or thousands of decision variables.
Cerato will focus on:
·
geo-system integrity of transportation and utility
systems
·
research related to underground pipeline behavior,
foundation modeling and foundation system fragility analysis.
“This is an incredible opportunity
for the University of Oklahoma to play a central role in addressing a problem
of national significance,” said Wang.
“My colleagues and I are very excited about the prospects of
collaborating with leading researchers in many disciplines nationwide to
advance the state-of-the-art in community resilience assessment.”
