CSEI Seminar - Challenges for engineering resilience

Abstract

Challenges for engineering resilience need inter-disciplinary approaches based in complexity science to make them tractable.  This seminar reflects on three years of findings on the ENCORE project – an EPSRC engineering grand challenge network plus.  In particular, it focuses on what we think we need to do next which is about addressing four challenge themes of engineered systems: systems evolution, increasing complexity through connected networks, design for resilience (elegant failure and recovery), and performance resilience tension.

Bio

Liz Varga is the Professor of Complex Systems at UCL, and is transitioning and still active as Director of the Complex Systems Research Centre and as Professor of Complex Infrastructure Systems at Cranfield University. Professor Varga is co-director of ENCORE, the grand challenge engineering resilience network plus, and is an unfunded co-I of DAFNI.  She has expertise in trans-disciplinary research projects across infrastructure systems (energy, transport, water, waste and telecoms) and food systems focusing on sustainable outcomes for the environment, society and the economy. An internationally leading academic in complexity science theories, methods and tools, Liz Varga has a direct interest in ways that science and technology can deliver services from critical systems more innovatively and resiliently. She does this mindful of trends and uncertainties in climate, societal and institutional change, and business models.  She has experience of system transitions, modelling the effects of policy, technology and innovation interventions at various levels, and analysing computational results representing economic, environmental and societal effects.