Guest professor Prof. Dr. Alice Alipour presents at ETH Zürich on 30 November

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Abstract: Natural hazards can result in significant damage and disruption to the physical built environment, including various infrastructure systems and the socio-economic activities that rely on them. Investigations of recent disasters caused by natural hazards have revealed the importance of infrastructure resilience, especially for an integrated safety, performance, and functionality. Infrastructure resilience is defined as the ability to get prepared, plan for, absorb, and recover from actual or potential extreme events. Thus, a thorough understanding of each component associated with this definition is deemed essential to move toward achieving resilient infrastructures. Furthermore, there are three unique attributes in this critical domain that should be synergistically accounted for: (1) infrastructure systems are geographically distributed systems and have a large number of components, (2) natural hazards are highly uncertain both spatially and temporally, and (3) community resources are limited, especially in the aftermath of extreme events. The combination of the outlined considerations underlines the importance of ex-ante and ex-post decisions to promote resiliency not only at the component but also at the system level. For establishing the resilience in the new generation of civil infrastructures, this presentation will introduce the formulation of a nonlinear two-stage stochastic programming model that aims to build a balanced portfolio of ex-ante and ex-post activities to reduce the risk and time of recovery, while minimizing the direct and indirect losses. The developed model benefits from a data-driven simulation environment, which combines scenario reduction, hybrid heuristic method of evolution strategy, and high-performance parallel computing, to find optimal resilience-oriented solutions. By examining the model in a large-scale, geographically-distributed transportation network subjected to flood events, the main capabilities are evaluated. This leads to the recommendations for further implementing such models to transform the resiliency of the built environment under extreme events.

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Alice Alipour is a Visiting Professor at D-BAUG’s Institute for Infrastructure Management and a Senior Fellow at ETH Collegium Helveticum. In her home institution, i.e., Iowa State University, she is a Cerwick Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. Prof. Dr. Alipour’s research is primarily on the investigation of civil infrastructure systems subjected to extreme events. This is with a focus on the application of data-driven probabilistic methods and decision-making approaches toward assessing and enhancing the resilience of the physical built environment under multi-threat conditions. Prof. Dr. Alipour has authored over 100 publications in leading journals, archived conferences, books, and agency reports. Her research is supported by funding from multiple federal agencies, including the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), as well as multiple state, local, and private agencies. She was the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2018 and Charles W. Schafer Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in 2021