3rd Enterprise and Infrastructure Resilience Workshop

The engineering systems designed today are increasingly complex and dependent on other surrounding systems. Due to this complexity and interdependence, it is often impossible to predict all disruptive events that can be expected in the system’s lifecycle, which may even lead to economically impactful disruptions and critical failures. Resilience is a concept encompassing various disciplines, and the creation of a resilient system will enable the system to recover from unpredicted disturbances and adapt to these new conditions.

Efforts to improve resilience of chemical supply chains, chemical plants and energy networks will benefit society in by providing techniques and approaches that are needed to quickly respond to rapidly changing conditions. Knowledge from topics covered in this workshop is expected to improve our economy's and society's ability to recover from or adapt to large scale disasters, pandemics, stronger hurricanes, and deep freeze from winter storms.

Further, these discussions will emphasize sustainability and safety throughout development. This virtual workshop will be advertised to a diverse audience. The NSF funds will be used to support student, post-doctoral fellow, and early-career researcher attendance, for those who would not otherwise be able to afford the registration.

Incorporating concepts from resilience engineering in the design of systems such as chemical plants, chemical supply chains, and energy networks would be very effective in minimizing undesired effects of unforeseen disturbances yet requires expertise from various disciplines in science and engineering such as chemical engineers, sustainability engineers, mathematicians, and more. This workshop explores multifaceted resilience strategies for the modern enterprise that address dependence on external systems, such as the environment, stakeholders, shareholders, and society.

The workshop would bring together professionals from various fields that are working in academia, industry, and government to have a wide range of perspectives. Such a combination of attendees has the potential of fostering impactful discussions and potential collaborations that would serve to further advance the field. Topics to be integrated at this workshop include risk management, optimization, operations research, sustainable engineering, critical infrastructure, process supply chains, computational models, machine learning methods, multi-scale systems analysis tools, and process safety.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.