Overall Research Vision
Our overall research vision is SEED, where SEED == “Strategic [Urban] Ecologies, Engineering, and Decision-making.” We conduct research in infrastructure management, including sustainability assessment and risk analysis; regulatory risk assessment and policy-focused research, especially for environmental contaminants and infrastructure systems; and, statistical/mathematical modeling approaches to decision support. These multi-disciplinary interests are unified under the Earth Systems Engineering and Management (ESEM) paradigm for civil/environmental systems design.
Statistical and Mathematical Modeling Approaches to Decision Support
One of our principal areas of research involves statistical modeling and decision structuring to support risk analysis of critical infrastructure systems. As the ability to collect and store multiple streams of data increases rapidly, we must be able to identify meaningful patterns and test exploratory hypotheses rapidly in these data. Our research explores the use of graphical statistical models and generalized linear models to support decision makers as they try to make sense of these data in their operational contexts.
Infrastructure Sustainability Assessment and Risk Analysis
Infrastructure systems are multi-disciplinary systems, across their life cycles, and two of the most important ways these multiple disciplines interact are: i.) through management and mitigation of the consequences of adverse or unforeseen events; and ii.) evaluation of the threats and opportunities posed by the coupling of human and natural systems in view of local environmental carrying capacity. This coupling requires that we take an evolutionary perspective to infrastructure system development. Our research focuses on supporting such an evolutionary outlook by exploring decision-analytic tools for synthesizing system performance evaluation with uncertainty analysis to obtain metrics for infrastructure sustainability measurement and infrastructure resilience measurement.
Regulatory Risk Analysis and Policy-Focused Research
It is often very difficult for human system owners (i.e., product manufacturers, drinkng water utilities, electric power plants, etc.) to bear all costs of operation or production of a product or process. In economics, these costs are called externalities. Externalities may include the public health costs of pollution, cascading failures, propagating delays, or other negative unintended outcomes that may not be the responsibility of system owners. As engineers, we often serve the public by assessing these externalities and recommending technological solutions that mitigate these costs or evaluating policy instruments intended to address these costs through policy-focused risk research. Our research has a broad policy focus, especially in understanding the public health impacts of infrastructure system operation or consumer product formulation.