| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | August 29, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 29, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1638336 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
William Miller
wlmiller@nsf.gov (703)292-7886 OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $299,579.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $299,579.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1320 SOUTH DIXIE HIGHWAY STE 650 CORAL GABLES FL US 33146-2919 (305)284-3924 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
1251 Memorial Drive Coral Gables FL US 33146-2926 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | CRISP - Critical Resilient Int |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Coastal cities play a critical role in the global economy. However, they are being increasingly exposed to natural hazards and disasters, such as hurricanes, and recurrent flooding due to the rise of sea-levels caused by climate change. These disasters directly impact critical coastal infrastructure such as the energy, transportation, water, and sewer systems as well as streets, buildings and houses of coastal cities, thus adversely affecting the safety and well-being of their residents. The goal of this research is to create new paradigms for the resilient design of urban communities, and uniquely tailored toward the design of coastal cities, thus contributing to NSF's science and engineering mission. Results from this research will help make critical coastal infrastructures more tolerant to damage. The in turn will foster socio-economic resilience by enabling anticipatory interventions. The developed techniques and simulation models will redefine traditional urban design strategies through the integration of architecture, urban design, land-use planning, civil engineering, and advanced computational methods that explicitly consider socio-economic drivers. This project will be conducted in close collaboration with the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. In addition to these collaborations serving as as case studies for the proposed research, the research will directly and tangibly benefit high-risk coastal urban centers by providing them with clear, context-specific recommendations with respect to implementing resiliency. Broad dissemination efforts will be undertaken via a series of seminars for decision-makers and practitioners within the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. An exposition at the Miami Museum of Science will be organized to raise awareness and promote research on resiliency. The project will involve students via direct engagement in the research as well as via new learning modules that will integrate research findings into the existing curriculum. The proposed educational plan will thus help train a new workforce that is skilled in STEM disciplines, in general, and adept in resiliency planning of coastal cities, in particular. In addition to serving NSF's science mission, therefore, this project also serves its education mission.
This transformative research will introduce a novel methodological approach that symbiotically integrates urban design and socio-economic considerations into an advanced simulation and optimization framework to enhance the resilience of a coastal city's critical infrastructure. This human-centered computational framework will help identify key resilient infrastructures, and design and land use patterns that will increase the damage tolerance of coastal cities while reducing the socio-economic impacts of coastal hazards and disasters. The proposed approach will bring together an interdisciplinary set of collaborators from engineering, architecture, and social sciences, to yield several key innovations: 1) a holistic human-centered computational framework for the design of resilient cities; 2) identification of key typologies, morphologies and their interdependencies by analyzing the urban design and its infrastructure networks; 3) an innovative flexible modeling and computational framework that integrate socio-economic characteristics for simulation and resilience optimization (damage tolerance) of the critical infrastructure; 4) a novel optimization framework that will facilitate making damage tolerance decisions that can achieve anticipatory resilience in face of disaster uncertainty; and 5) new identified interdependences, trends, and typologies of socio-economic system of highly-urbanized coastal communities based on the cities of Miami and Miami Beach in Florida. In summary, the proposed research will lay the scientific foundation for envisioning and redesigning resilient coastal cities making them ready to meet anticipated future challenges.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
A community’s ‘resiliency quotient’ is reliant on its capacity to address the diverse multipliers, which impact not only the physical but also the economic and social factors that permit a society to both survive and thrive, and for that reason, they require a holistic approach. In this research, the intellectual merits include interdisciplinary scientific foundations that can be used to design, develop, and optimize a suite of socio-econo-technical solutions that can be used to secure cities against natural and human-made disasters, with a focus on coastal cities. The developed frameworks and algorithms are grounded in rigorous architectural, socio-economic, and engineering approaches that come together to design sustainable resilience solutions for coastal cities. At the root of climate stressors is the quality, scale, and characteristics of a given urban morphology and its chorus of architectural typologies, and thus they are fundamental to a community’s measure of adaptation and mitigation. Therefore, the proposed ‘Storm Surge Building Vulnerability’ (SSBV) model, which was developed based on a combination of physical and socio-economic parameters complemented with synoptic survey results on the urban morphology, can be used to assess building vulnerability from a human-centered perspective. This finer grained assessment of buildings, through the lens of how individuals utilizing those structures are directly impacted by a storm surge event, has the potential of better informing local stakeholders and policy makers in their decision-making processes and strategic planning efforts, amplifying anticipatory resilience. In parallel, the proposed abstract mathematical model for the analysis of interconnected objects and their relationships can be used to decipher the state of complex self-equilibrated network systems. Understanding the abstract properties of network equilibrium models is critical for their application as well as for capturing and studying interdependencies and their effects. In the context of energy-system resilience studies, the development of a hierarchical community load optimal scheduling framework can facilitate the operation of a resilient community during off-grid periods while the integration of occupant behavior in the model of a net-zero energy community allows to better model and predict disaster impacts for energy systems. When combined the proposed developments present a computational framework that can have a great impact on enhancing the resilience of existing coastal cities as well as on the development of new communities. Moreover, through the collaboration with the Cities of Miami and Miami Beach, as well as Miami Dade County, the proposed work have direct impact on Southeast Florida, a region that is constantly exposed to natural hazards, such as hurricanes, storm surge, and sea-level rise, and leads the nation by the manner it is tackling the emerging challenges resulting from climate change and sea-level rise. The foundational nature of the research led to broad impacts across multiple disciplines ranging from resilience to architecture, urban design, engineering, mathematics, as well as network and energy modeling. The broader impacts included a very broad dissemination to various communities in the architecture, urban design, and engineering, as well as the involvement of several undergraduate and graduate architecture and engineering students in various aspects of this research. In addition, through the related educational activities (curriculum and program development that include the creation of a new Masters of Professional Science in Urban Sustainability and Resilience, as well as student involvement), the research initiatives have had a consequential educational impact. These initiatives have resulted in positive and enduring sequels, allowing current and future students to understand the concept of resilience, as well as the function of critical infrastructures, thereby leading to an emerging workforce well-versed in the pressing social, economic, and technological needs of coastal cities.
Last Modified: 03/31/2020
Modified by: Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
